As you may know Churchteams started out as a small group software. We grew because of the innovative ways we developed to help churches connect people to groups, group leaders communicate, and staff to coach and care for groups.
The last few months I've been writing articles on the Top 12 Ways to Use Registrations. Small groups have to be included in that list, so here are some ways to use the Registration feature for small groups. I have added some follow up recommendations as well. I think you'll find them helpful.
How To Find Leaders
The obvious place to start is by creating a group, "Interested in Leading A Small Group." On the registration form be sure to ask about their experience with small groups prior to coming to your church. Many times you'll discover people with a lot of experience that haven't been tapped by asking this question.
Don't be afraid to add people to this group manually based on personal conversations. If you are tracking consistency of attendance in small groups, the "Attendance By Member Consistency" report filtered to your small groups is a gold mine for finding faithful people who might be qualified to lead others. And, some of these will be people who were not on your radar.
Another suggestion is to talk with or send the registration link to your leaders and invite them to refer people they think might be good leaders. Just encourage them to use the "Prior Experience" registration field to share their name and why they think this person would be a good leader.
Collecting all this information in a group gives you a single place to communicate with and track everyone you are talking to about leading groups. Please don't try to do this without using the Notes feature to track and schedule follow up reminders and conversations.
Keep your "Interested in Leading A Small Group" clean by moving people out when you discover they are not interested or now is not the time. If you think they might be in six months or a year, just make a Follow up Note to remind you of that then, and remove them from the active group for now. You can put them back in later. Those that are interested now should be moved into either a "Ready for Training" group or create their potential group and transfer them to that group as leaders. This makes their potential group visible and available for people who might be interested.
How To Connect People
If you are a small church with just a few small groups or you prefer centralizing placement of people in groups, you can create a single "Interested In Finding A Small Group" group and create a registration to get the information you need to place people in groups.
In my opinion, a far better way is to refuse to be the bottleneck and let people connect with each other by themselves. Groupfinder was designed for this purpose. This Knowledge Base article, "How do I create a link for a subset of groups and access it with Text-to-Church?" gives you all the steps to create a link and embeddable code to give people access to one another from your website, Text-to-Church, social media or anywhere else. Don't worry, the small group pastor or admin can be copied on all communication so that they know what connections are being made.
In addition, encourage your leaders to use the Notes section of the Meeting Reports to update their coach and staff on conversations with those interested in their group. You can also use Follow Up Notes to group leaders to track follow up referrals from Connect Cards or pastoral conversations.
Our weekly report reminder emails are designed to empower your leaders to care for and communicate with the people in their group. They can also do this with the Text-to-Church keyword ME or the Member App, whichever they prefer. The residual impact is that by doing this, leaders naturally keep their group roster and contact information for their group up-to-date. This solves another huge problem for pastors and staff.
The People Map report can be used to create a map of all your adult members who are not currently in a small group. Using that map, you can also create one or several "Potential" small groups. These can be added to your Groupfinder list. In addition, I recommend you find a host within that group, and as a small group coach or pastor, set up a time to meet with everyone in that group. I launched several groups by meeting for 3-6 weeks with a group of people like this. In that time frame it becomes easy for you and/or the group to identify who can serve as the point person or facilitator going forward.
Conclusion
You guys, Churchteams when used to its full potential, can make the task of finding group leaders and connecting people to small groups managable. We've built a lot of things on to our original software that have only made it better at that original purpose.
BONUS. Now not only can we help your small groups thrive, but we can empower your data to work together in all areas of ministry.
