In the last blog I shared ideas on how to best use our church database to recruit volunteers.  This is a huge effort for many church staff every late summer and early fall.  But, the rest of the year is about helping these volunteers thrive and succeed in their ministry.  Here are some ideas on how to use Churchteams to help you make sure your volunteers have as positive an experience as possible.

 August is the time of the year that many church staff are feeling the pressure of recruiting for their fall ministies.  The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers few.  And the staff are feeling the pressure of both.   I remember this season well from my many years as a small group and family pastor.  My wife and kids remember it as well.  Dad was always a little more amped up.  

In the last blog, we talked about how to organize your church volunteer teams by answering a few basic questions.  Once you have those figured out and have created your teams, you are ready to schedule and manage them.  Here's how that is done in Churchteams.

A client/friend set up a call with me recently to talk about the best way to set up their groups for volunteer scheduling.  As we talked, I realized that it might be helpful to do a blog post to help church volunteers and staff consider how to set up volunteer teams to make scheduling as easy as possible.  

I often talk with church staff and pastors about the discipline of taking attendance and why it matters.  Neither,  "because we've always done it that way",  nor "we've never done it before" are persuasive arguments.  

Have you ever been on a trip and heard that familiar robotic voice…rerouting? The implication is that you’ve made a wrong turn somewhere and you need to get back on track. Sometimes, it’s not that you made a wrong turn, but the GPS that you are following found a faster, better route to the same destination.

A few weeks ago one of our clients was having an issue with a company that was purchased a couple of years ago by a private equity firm.  He contacted me to see if we might have an idea about what was going on.   When I emailed the company to learn more, I discovered that they were training new frontline support staff.  They had hired young people with a great heart who did not yet have the experience our client expected and needed.

So, we're talking about text to register a couple of weeks ago.  James throws out the idea of using texting to take worship attendance.  This is an age-old question that churches ask us about all the time.  We discuss it more, and Mark realizes it's something he can easily add.  A day later and it's done.

Anytime someone asks about a specific solution to a problem, we ask questions to better under the problem itself first.  This practice enables us to take a fresh look at a problem rather than simply comparing it to other solutions.   Calendars is a great example.  What are the problems that calendars exist to solve in churches?   Here are the three that I've come up with and how we've chosen to address them.  

In 2014, our friends at Leadership Network found that over 8,000 churches in the U.S. were multisite.  And, that was 3 years ago!  In a blog post last year, Portable Church points out that churches of all sizes are going multisite.  This isn't a fad, it's now a normal part of ministry.  In fact I go to a campus of a very large, multisite church ... and love it.   So, what must church software be able to do to serve this growing movement?   Here are six things I believe are essential.