Churches have always addressed the needs of families. Priority is often given to worship and the education or discipleship of not only children, but also their parents. As the role of marriage and family continues to denigrate in our culture, churches are taking up the slack to help people better understand and align with God's design. Although we don't do content for training, another question on the minds of these churches is how can a church database help manage family ministry? Here how we do it.
- Secure child check-in. Security is the primary concern of parents in choosing a church. Make sure their fears are assuaged by welcoming them, getting their information and providing tangible evidence that security matters to you. We give you lots of choices on how to do this:
- Kiosk
- Barcode Scanner
- Tablet / Mobile
- Text-to-Check-in
- Recruit volunteers. With a lot of young families, comes the constant and often exhausting challenge of finding volunteers. Take advantage of the information in your database to create an ongoing system for identifying and communicating with potential helpers.
- Track spiritual gifts and ministry interests.
- Pool interested people in groups.
- Use group as your dashboard for information.
- Determine availability by viewing other ministry involvement.
- Track personal communication and set follow-up reminders.
- Transfer or remove people from the pool when they respond.
- Background checks. When you recruit a volunteer, make sure they know you will need a background check on them for security purposes. Insurance liability requires and today's culture expects you to do these. We can help.
- Integrated with Protect My Ministry.
- Request background check from the member's profile.
- Once completed, PMM attaches it to their profile. Top level acess only.
- Benchmark completion date for future renewals and reporting.
- Volunteer training. Alignment around purpose, values, system and procedures is essential for volunteers to work as a team. You will create the content of this training uniquely for your situation, but your church software can be a vital tool to help you execute it.
- Use event registration for volunteers to sign-up for training.
- Identify and email / text those you want to participate.
- Take attendance if multiple training sessions.
- Benchmark completion dates of training - member attribute.
- Volunteer scheduling & reminders. Once you've recruited and trained volunteers, you will need to schedule their time to serve and communicate / remind them. That's right, we can help!
- Group volunteers as a serving team.
- Use "Schedule Volunteers" feature to assign dates and roles.
- Text and email invitations.
- One click response for team members to accept or decline.
- Leader is notified of team responses.
- Reminders automatically sent out the week before.
- Attendance is automatically taken 2 hours after event.
- Track hours volunteered.
- Communication. Ministry teams are built by relationships, and relationships are built by communication. You will want to stay in regular touch with volunteers to thank them, update them, and remind them of the importance of their role.
- Report to see birthdays / anniversarys next month.
- Text individuals, small groups, or entire ministry.
- Email and labels.
- Newsletter list.
- Schedule and track email delivery.
- Reporting. Recognition of people is important. Because your database is collecting so much information, you can then leverage use of that in many different ways.
- Recognize faithfulness.
- Spot volunteers or families not engaged.
- See involvement over time.
- Track impact of serving on stewardship.
- Answer questions.
- Event registration. Family ministry is often augmented by special events such as camp, VBS, seminars, conferences and other gatherings. It is an awesome thing to have a church management software that includes event registration.
- Customize forms.
- Integrated payments.
- Secondary registration for childcare.
- Online or text to access registration form.
- Dashboard to track all event information.
Deuteronomy 6 tells us, "These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up."
It's easy for me to imagine what it looks like to have a family that loves Jesus with all their heart, knows the Bible and talks about how to live it out all day long. These are the families that are making a difference in our world. We are honored for the privilege to help your church build ministries that are that significant.
