How The Trevor Project Scaled Lifesaving Volunteer Training

The Trevor Project stands as the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) young people. The organization’s mission of ending suicide among LGBTQ+ young people, requires a dedicated team of internal employees and volunteer counselors, trained to deliver compassionate, accredited, crisis intervention services. Training these volunteers is not just a necessity; it is the key to fulfilling the organization’s critical mission. In their search for a nonprofit training platform, The Trevor Project faced a significant challenge: how to scale their complex training program to onboard more volunteers without compromising the quality and rigor required for such sensitive work. 

The Challenge: Scaling a High-Stakes Volunteer Training Program 

 The Trevor Project’s training is extensive, requiring volunteers to complete over 40 hours of instruction covering a wide range of complex topics. Their previous system for delivering this crucial training was not built to handle a growing volunteer base. They needed a centralized and user-friendly lms for crisis counselor training that could grow with them. The platform had to be robust enough to manage sophisticated compliance training requirements while remaining intuitive for volunteers who are focused on learning to save lives, not on navigating complicated software.  

They also needed a learning platform that could enable their team to deliver thorough, high-quality training nationwide – to their team of staff and volunteers – without disrupting their 24/7 crisis support service. Lastly, the Trevor Project team was looking for an LMS that offered a mix of live instructor-led training and flexible, on-demand learning modules to keep everything running smoothly. 

The search was on for a nonprofit LMS that could meet these unique requirements. 

The Solution: A Centralized, Scalable Crisis Counselor Training Platform 

After a thorough search, The Trevor Project chose Litmos as its official crisis counselor training platform. Litmos provided a powerful, centralized solution that streamlined the entire volunteer training process. The platform’s intuitive interface and robust features allowed the organization to build out a comprehensive volunteer and staff training program that could handle high a high volume of learners and allow seamless tracking to monitor learning outcomes while meeting accreditation requirements. 

“Litmos LMS was chosen for its ability to provide both asynchronous and synchronous training for our crisis intervention counselors. This addressed our main pain point of needing to train a geographically dispersed staff and volunteer community while maintaining 24-hour service availability. Our goal is to train counselors to support a high volume of contacts, and Litmos allows us to deliver rigorous training that meets accreditation requirements and track progress.”

— Nova Bright-Willams, Head of Internal Training, Learning & Development at The Trevor Project   

The Trevor Project leverages several key Litmos features to deliver impactful and scalable training.  

• Flexible learning paths, built with SCORM files and multimedia, support learner autonomy and accessibility 

• Teams and Roles & Permissions features allow for more precise audience segmentation, to streamline the assignment of role and team-specific training content  

• Custom reports and manual progress editing offers The Trevor Project team the flexibility to track learner development remotely and help volunteers stay on top of 

• The Litmos pre-built Salesforce was instrumental in keeping learner progress updated in the organization’s existing CRM, by automatically the Salesforce contact records of any learner who completes a training module in the Litmos LMS. 

“The Litmos and Salesforce integration means we can easily see up to date training information exactly when we need to in Salesforce, whether that’s checking if an individual is ready to progress to the next volunteer stage, or reporting on what percentage of a cohort has completed a new module” 

 — Marina Shuman, Senior Salesforce Manager at The Trevor Project 

The Results: More Volunteers Trained to Fulfill a Lifesaving Mission  

By implementing Litmos, The Trevor Project successfully scaled its training infrastructure to meet the training needs of its growing volunteer base. The organization has been able to train thousands of new volunteers, directly enabling them to serve a significantly higher number of young people in need.  

​​​​​When asked about the overall benefits of Litmos, Bright-Williams noted: “Litmos allows us to meet each trainee where they are at on their own time. It has been invaluable to support our 24/7 operations, and we get positive feedback all the time from folks about how easy it is to use.”  

The partnership between The Trevor Project and Litmos is a powerful testament to how the right learning technology can help nonprofit organizations overcome significant challenges and achieve their goals. 

To learn more about The Trevor Project’s success story, read the full case study here.  

See what’s possible with a powerful, easy-to-use LMS. Schedule a demo of Litmos today!