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 Call To Action: Ministry Connection Central
Create a Ministry Connection Central group in Churchteams to be your collection point for all responses. Go to Registration Settings in this group to create the registration form. Use Registration Attributes to create form questions like "What ministry area interests you?". Then add the responses and use the Auto-register feature to put people into Ministry Connection Specific groups for follow-up. Note: unless you already have done it, you may need to save your work to create the Ministry Connection Specific groups that align with each response. Ex. Ministry Connection Children, Ministry Connection Youth, Ministry Connection Hospitality, etc..
Use the registration link for your Ministry Connection Central group on your website and all forms of communication. Assign a keyword to use with Text-to-Register.
Every call to action presented to the congregation by any communication method now directs people to one central group. The Auto-register feature in turn copies people to Ministry Connection Specific groups for staff or volunteer follow-up.
The Follow-up System: Ministry Connection Specific
Customize the group view of the Ministry Connection groups to make it an effective dashboard holding all the information necessary for follow-up. The columns might include: name, email, phone numbers, Notes, Spiritual Gifts, Ministry Interests, Current Group Involvement. On the Group View Customization page set up the view to sort in ascending order based on the follow-up date of the notes field so that past and currently due follow-up notes are on the top.
Train staff and volunteers to use Notes to track all their interactions with people and then to make follow-up reminders or assignments.
Click on the Communicate tab then Workflows to create a Ministry Connection Workflow that uses this specific Ministry Connection group as the enrollment group. Be sure to Map what you want the workflow to do first, then build it. Define your goal and the pathway. Here's an example. Goal: To get people interested in serving in youth ministry to register for training.
Path elements might be:
- Schedule Follow-up - to notify responsible staff or volunteer and provide a due date.
- Send an email - Thanks for interest. Set expectations. Link to Ministry Training and / or link to an application.
- Wait for certain date.
- Email - Reminder to register for training in 10 days.
- Wait 7 days.
- Text - Training in 3 days, register now.
- Wait 7 days.
- Email - Missed training, still interested? (Yes, re-enroll them)
- Wait 7 days.
- Email - Invite them to register for Serving Central again. (Nice way to say we're removing you - sufficient follow-up is done).
- Remove from this specific Ministry Connection Group
You have now created an effective system for following up people who are interested in serving in ministry. You've given them a clear opportunity to respond and connected with them at least 5 times by email or text and another time or two personally. If they haven't responded, you can be confident you've done due diligence. If they have, they are now ready for the training phase. This is the topic of the next post.
