With today's technology, you know there has to be a hack to seamlessly organize the administrative process for everything related to volunteers.
You know the processes involved and the different material and software applications that you use for each one, but what if there were a single software that can bring it all together?
You know what, there is! That's the topic of this next series of blogs. In this one, we'll introduce the seven parts of the volunteer process in church and then in weeks to come we'll dig deeper into each one and how Churchteams helps you manage it.
My goal in this series is to help you think of church software less in terms of features and more in terms of purposes. Personally, I started thinking this way last year with the blog post on Virtual Reality.
In May, I expanded on the idea in the post on Marketing Technology and the Stages of Evangelism. The recent series on using Data to Track Signs of Discipleship continued this line of thinking.
Really, we've just started to explore the use of church management software for the purposes of evangelism and discipleship. Together with you guys, we're going to learn more. Let's keep that dialog going. But, at the same time let me further expand the discussion by looking at using Churchteams to manage the purpose of ministry. Otherwise known as serving or volunteering.
Here are the seven parts of the volunteer process from the pastoral staff perspective.
- Recruit. Just as "America runs on Dunkin", so churches run on volunteers. The cup of coffee for finding volunteers should be your church database through registrations and member attributes that get you going on your volunteer search.
- Interview. Once you've identified them, you need a way to connect with potential volunteers to hear their story and share expectations. Use groups to see everyone at this stage of the process at once. Then record what you learned and schedule a follow-up for the next action step using notes
- Verify. Background checks are essential for many volunteer ministries especially those that involve children. In Churchteams you can add an option to a registration or email a link for volunteers to complete the necessary form
- Train. From the interview group move qualified people to another group for training. From here send email or text reminders of live meetings, track attendance, or launch a virtual training workflow.
- Schedule. Once trained, transfer new volunteers to the team on which they will serve. Use the Service Volunteers feature to create schedules to affirm and remind volunteers of the details of their service.
- Track. Use All Check through Text-to-Church for volunteers to check themselves and their family into everything they are doing during a service. This will capture their attendance.
- Care. Attendance gives you data to measure the amount of time people are giving to serving. It also helps you recognize consistency and especially inconsistency that can be a flag that pastoral care is needed. Notes are a great resource for tracking interactions and scheduling ongoing volunteer care. Our email and texting features are state of the art for staying in touch.
If you manage these different steps in different places, then you know how people get lost in the cracks transitioning from one place to another.
The beauty of doing it all right in Churchteams is that "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts." Aristotle is attributed with that quote. I wonder if he liked coffee?
