I remember from my church staff days that it was all hands on deck for Christmas Eve  services.  I see the staff at my church today all working together to cover volunteer spots for these services just like we did.  Because it is such a special time for families, I doubt  this stretch for volunteers on Christmas Eve will ever change.  But, we can help.

Eight weeks ago, I did a blog post on using Workflows to help you with volunteer recruitment.  This is the time of the year that most church staff are stressed out to make sure all the volunteers needed are in place.  But, once you get them recruited and trained, there is still the challenge of getting everyone scheduled.

Today's post is a follow-up to last week's on volunteer recruitment.  The two posts work in tandem, you really need to master both to get the process down.

Last time we saw the need for a Ministry Connection Central group that simplifies church-wide communication and then auto-registers responses for specific Ministry Connection follow-up.

We then saw how to use a specific Ministry Connection group to develop a follow-up system to move those interested in connecting to their next step of registering for training. The system automates communication to ensure we are doing due diligence as staff to honor their initial interest.

The church runs on volunteers. Pastors and staff are looking for help. Attenders and members are anxious to help. So, why is recruiting hard?

Every week or so staff get notified that people want to serve in their area of ministry. They send an email or leave a voice mail and if there's no response, they're on to next week's contacts. They don't have an adequate system or bandwidth to continue pursuing people.

Meanwhile attenders and members keep responding to the asks about their interests on Sunday and wonder why staff don't respond like promised. It could be that the email or voice message came in the middle of their work day, got put aside for later and then forgotten.

We recently gave some thought to how to solve this problem using the Churchteams system and Workflows. Here's what we came up.  See what you think.

The best place to connect with parents on Sunday morning is when they check-in their kids.  This is just as true for your members and regular attenders as it is for your guests.  You may already be using that time to start the follow-up process.  If not, see section D in the check-in view.  But, why not use the same opportunity to capture attendance for everything everyone in the family is attending or serving in that morning?  

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.