"Why bother to do church communications?"
"Who do we do the church bulletin for?"
"What are some of the biggest mistakes people make in church communications?"
"How did you get started in this ministry?" [Read more...]
Effective Delegation, The Ultimate Balancing Act, Part 2
In Part 1, Gayle shared the foundation of why and how to delegate. This article goes into specific advice on how to make the delegation experience a successful one for you and your volunteers.
• Be available.
Once your worker has directions and starts the job you can get on with your own tasks. Before you do, assure the recruit you are available for questions. For most jobs it is also advantageous to establish checkpoints—agreed upon times you check on the task’s progress. Resist any urge to pop in more often. Trusting people is essential to effective delegation.
• Encourage, appreciate, recognize.
The key to having a good supply of enthusiastic workers is to make heroes of the ones you already have. Even the busiest people enjoy, and will want to make time for, opportunities to serve where their contributions are appreciated. Recall how you felt last time someone gave you a spontaneous “Good job!” Words are powerful. Be generous with your honest praise.
Many churches with regular corps of volunteers have clever ways to identify them: shirts, hats, and pins with a special logo; regular dinners or luncheons; an honor roll in the newsletter or on the website. You will think of many more ways to show your appreciation for these important people—not just the work they produce.
• Evaluate results.
Delegation is more of an art than a science. Situations and people are different; there are no magic rules—only reliable guidelines. Don’t expect instant success. Your other skills have matured and improved with practice—so will your skills of delegation .
Gauge how delegation is working for you by asking yourself some hard questions after each assignment is completed.
• Was time saved? Can I expect that in the future?
• Was the work done well?
• Did I pick the right person for the task?
• Was this a positive experience for all?
• What techniques would I repeat?
• What would I do differently?
• Put aside excuses.
Church office professionals offer a lot of reasons for choosing not to delegate: it is easier to do it myself; the job is mine so I should do it; I couldn’t find anyone to take this on; I don’t have time to explain to someone; it might not turn out well; I would just have to do it over. You can probably add an excuse or two of your own.
Each reason is plausible. Any one could persuade you to just “do it myself.” Nevertheless, the risks are slight compared to the benefits: your own professional growth, the opportunities for service provided, time and effort used most effectively, and a more balanced work load—for starters.
Take the risk. Delegate.
___________________________________
For Part One of "Effective Delegation, The Ultimate Balancing Act" CLICK HERE
You might also enjoy:
D
evotions for Church Communicators
This is a great book to give out as a thank-you to anyone involved as a volunteer in the church communications ministry. Click on the book to go to the link that tells you more about it.
CLICK HERE or on the image to read one of the devotions from the book above. CLICK HERE to go to a download of a FREE flyer that you can get to share.
Share this:
Flyer to encourage church communications: You are one of the Great Ones!
Church communicators work very hard at one of the most important tasks in the church and the purpose of this piece is to encourage them.
The flyer to the left is free for everyone to download and print, either to remind yourself of the incredible importance of your work or to encourage another church communicator. It is a copy of the devotion, "You are one of the Great Ones and far more important than you may realize" CLICK HERE if you want read the devotion before you download it.
It is a black and white PDF and would look very nice printed on colored or parchment-looking paper. [Read more...]
Share this:
Church Communicator’s review of Six Strategies for Effective Church Communications
I try very hard to create materials that are useful to all church communicators. I do pour heart, soul, and many prayers into them and I send them off (typos and all) trusting God that they make sense and are useful.
It is wonderful to get positive feedback from people and following is a review of Six Strategies For Effective Church Communicators. I'm passing it along because I think the author covers many of the major points of the book well.
Please if you have comments, do send them to me and please put them in the comment sections of the books and even more on my books on amazon CLICK HERE to go to that link. Your opinion is what is so important--I don't do these to talk to myself, but to serve all of you as you create communications that will help your churches fully fulfill the Great Commission.
I don't do these to talk to myself, but to serve all of you as youelp your churches fully fulfill the Great Commission.
Email review of Six Strategies of Effective Church Communications
The Six Strategies are written in a concise style and makes for quick
reading... It should be very useful to help "train" those involved with PR
and church communications (the style should make it easier to get those who
don't like to read, to at least skim through the book).I agree wholeheartedly with all the observations, insights, strategies and
advice you give, and especially relate to, and identify with, your thoughts
that there are too many media channels to leave to one individual to
effectively communicate with, and that there should be a "communications
team" where individuals from the same "Body" work on different areas
according to their areas of familiarity. Also, that a congregation's
communications should reflect who they are and not try to convey an image
that does not match who they are.As I am in the printing business, I am "painfully aware" of the enormous and
fast changes happening in communications and the multitude of "channels"
that are appearing and evolving.[ I also notice you used some expressions from the OIKOS book (great
recommendation as well... I read it, although I don't agree with all the
content, but the basic message matches what I was taught in a "Master's
Plan" bible study from the 1980s.) ]
. . . . .
Again, thank you, thank you, thank you, for what you've assembled and
written in this book. I give this a big thumbs up! You put into easy to
follow words, thoughts that I have had for the past few years. Even the
bible passages caused me to smile, as I just completed working on quite a
number of them in the last few weeks for the liturgical scripture readings
in our PowerPoint for worship.In my opinion, the only thing needed to complement the strategies of the
book is a bit more explanation of the Five Steps so readers remember them
better as they read references to The Five Steps in the strategies. But I
guess I can look forward to that in the book you will publish soon: "The
Five Steps of Effective Church Communications and Marketing".from EW, Canada
If you want a copy of The Six Strategies of Effective Church Communication, CLICK HERE.
Share this:
Q & A: What do you use to back up files?
Question:
Do you back up your files? What system do you recommend?
Answer:
Summer is a good time to work on this because you don't have a major holiday to deal with and can take some time to tune up various systems in the church office. We all know the importance of backups for our work in church communications, however--just because we know we should, we don't always do them as often as we should. However, after having lost my share of important files, I now have three systems in place:
The three I use include:
1) Jump drives for when I am working on a book, publications, graphics project--I like to immediately back up important material. I don't always do this, but I try.
2) Separate hard drive: Again, I frequently back up important projects as I'm working on them on a small, but very large in capacity hard drive. This is what I tell my husband is that it is the "grab if the house if on fire" piece of hardware. I use this, even though I have an online backup system that I'll tell you about next because, first of all the backup system takes time--some files don't fully back up for a day or so. Second, I'm an old lady, not completely trusting of "the cloud." I like a tangible storage system. I use an older "Buffalo" drive, but there are newer, cheaper, bigger ones out there--just ask any tech person for a current recommendation.
3) Carbonite:( http://www.carbonite.com/en/ )I really like this program. It isn't free, it costs $59 a year (quite reasonable). What I like about it is that it works continuously in the background. I do the ones previously mentioned, but not nearly as often as I should and I sometimes forget important things. I don't have to do a thing for Carbonite to work--other than sign up. It's very easy to restore files and to transfer the system to a new computer (which I recently did).
The one thing to keep in mind with Carbonite is that the backups can seem a bit slow--but as I said it works in the background and doesn't seem to interfere with other online work. Be prepared when you first sign up for it because if you have a lot on your computer, it can take over a week--with your computer on 24/7 for it to do the initial backup. After that things seem to go quite smoothly.
What hardware, software or system you use isn't important, but here is what is
You must have an off-site backup system.
No matter how great your system in your home or church office, unexpected tragedies, weather events, and all kinds of things can happen. If a flash flood happens or a fire or an earthquake or whatever else, you might not have any time to grab your backup drive and run. You might not even be in the church office.
That is why a system like Carbonite is so useful--the backup is safe no matter if your computer and entire office is under water or burnt to a crisp.
One other important thing--be sure to email yourself--or store with a friend in another state or both the access codes to your online backups. Once again, as we've seen from the many current natural disasters, things can happen to destroy an entire community with no warning. You want to be a good servant and care well for all that is entrusted to you.
We are promised eternal security, our computers aren't
How good it is to know that no matter what tragedies happen to homes, churches, data and computers, that if we know Jesus as our Saviour--we will make it home to heaven. Secure, loved, eternally protected far beyond the guarantees of any earthy software online or off.
If you aren't sure of your eternal security with Jesus, you might enjoy reading:
Share this:
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 132
- 133
- 134
- 135
- 136
- …
- 205
- Next Page »