Effective Church Communications

Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and Biblical Inspiration to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission

Effective Church Communications provides Timeless Strategy and a Biblical Perspective to help churches create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. Our tools constantly change; our task doesn’t; we can help.

Recruiting Volunteers—Why and How

By Leave a Comment

Gayle Hilligoss Picture
Article by Gayle Hilligoss

Ed.note: Volunteers are often essential if you want to get done the amount of communications needed for all the ministries in a church. The primary ministry assistant usually has more than enough projects in addition to the primary communication work (bulletin, newsletter, website) of the church to keep her very busy. If the various ministries of the church including children's, men's, women's, mission's, singles', etc., are going to get all the needed communications done, the primary ministry assistant will need help. Gayle Hilligoss as usual has some wise and very practical advice on recruiting and working with volunteers.

 

Want to start a lively dialogue among ministry assistants? Bring up the subject of volunteers. After a candid discussion, those present at a seminar eventually did agree that selecting and training volunteers can:

• multiply your time and productivity
• require an investment of time and energy
• be a blessing—or not!

Applied to the church, the Pareto Principle or 80/20 Rule suggests 80 percent of work is done by 20 percent of the members. A lot of office professionals would like to locate a few people beyond that significant 20 percent and put them to work. In many churches budgets are tight, programs are expanding, and both paid and volunteer workers are overextended. People are busy. Why should they want to handle the office tasks you’d like to give away?

Research suggests people volunteer because they want to:

• share their time and resources
• provide something someone needs
• experience a sense of accomplishment
• feel more a part of the community
• gain experience at a skill
• contribute a skill or knowledge
• heal from a personal loss
• contribute to positive actions
• have influence on how things are done

Understanding motivation helps you build effective volunteer ministries which provide people opportunities to give, to share, and to grow. Everybody wins. Including you.

Those who have successfully recruited and worked with volunteers say a satisfactory experience depends on following proven basics.

Recruit selectively

We call them volunteers, but recruits is more accurate. Not to stumble over terminology, recruit your volunteers. Instead of putting out a blanket SOS, ask specific people to do specific jobs. Being a successful recruiter takes time and effort, but the results are worthwhile. Not only will you gain the help you need, the enlistees benefit from the experience as well.

Start by making a list of jobs you want to delegate. Be specific about what each job entails.

Make a list of possible helpers whose talents and personality make a good match to the tasks. Think beyond the people who already do everything. Consider those whose talents are not presently being utilized at the church. In every church there are individuals, some who are already busy individuals, who are willing and even eager to pitch in.

Write, call, or visit each prospective helper. Make your request and explain the task.

The key to recruiting these people is to let them know you have worthwhile tasks to do and their expertise is needed. People resent being asked to do simple busy work; likewise, no one enjoys being expected to perform far beyond his or her abilities.

Define expectations

Most recruiters do a good job of explaining what needs to be done. Fewer take the equally important step of identifying standards of performance. People perform better when goals are clear and specific; take time to define the quality of work you require.

For all but the most simple jobs, provide written instructions. Include in this job description the scope of the volunteer’s authority and to whom she is answerable. People need to know up front the criteria for excellence.

Ask for a short term commitment

Proceed cautiously. Start with a request for a single project. Or gain a commitment for a week or two. If the arrangement works well, you can ask for a repeat. If not, neither of you will be put in an awkward position to end it. Many longtime assistants suggest no volunteer, regardless of reputation or experience, should be recruited for more than a year at a time.

Provide guidance

Once your recruit has accepted, provide training depending on the complexity of the job. Don’t micro-manage, but do provide adequate instruction on how the job is to be done satisfactorily.

Be prepared to spend some time getting your recruit up to speed. She’s seen the written description, now show her how the job should be done. This is no time to be nonchalant. If you take training time lightly, you send the message this is not so important after all. Once any questions are answered, let the worker take over. Assure her you are available if needed.

Monitor progress

Check back in 15 minutes or so to see how things are going. Answer any questions. If there are problems, make course corrections right away.

Don’t overdo, but do check periodically as the project progresses. Observe what has been done since you last touched base. Ask the recruit to show progress made; discuss any changes to be made.

At the end of the task, spend a few minutes with your worker talking about the experience. Ask what she learned about the job, both positive and negative. Find out if there were any surprises and how she handled them.

An effective recruiter can learn a great deal about workers from this kind of feedback: how suited they are for the job, how they respond to suggestions, their ability to give and take directions, their work ethic, and more. Just as important, this is your opportunity to congratulate workers for good decisions, offer optional solutions, and ask for ideas on how the process might be improved. Good ideas often come from people looking at tasks with a fresh view.

Be pleasant, brief, and kind. You want your volunteers to succeed at their tasks.

Express appreciation

Appreciation and recognition are vital to a successful volunteer program. Churches use scores of devices to encourage esprit de corps: lunches, banquets, day trips, newsletter honor rolls, even a website devoted to volunteers and their activities.

Be as plain or as fancy as you like, have fun with it, and just be sure you use the magic words, thank you. Show volunteers they are valuable members of your church office team. Let them know the work they do is important to the success of the ministry. Set the example by your caring attitude, your positive spirit, your effectiveness.

Some churches provide attractive shirts for their volunteers; others use badges or baseball hats imprinted with a distinctive logo to identify their volunteer corps. Many honor their workers with certificates. These little extras not only show appreciation, they encourage team spirit.

An effective way to enlist more volunteers is to make heroes of the ones already serving.

Be realistic

Even though you do your best to choose the right person, equip each volunteer to do his or her best, and sincerely show your appreciation—still, this person is not a paid staff member and will likely operate with a different agenda. Be aware that some volunteers take commitment more seriously than others; don’t be dismayed if a volunteer turns out to be less than reliable.

Nevertheless, expect a good experience. Most of the time that is exactly what volunteers deliver!

 

Communications for a good continuing relationship with your volunteers

By Leave a Comment

Every church is desperate for volunteers. It's not only important to effectively recruit them, but after they are recruited, it is equally important to work hard to keep them. Unfortunately, the difference between how we treat volunteers when we are recruiting them and after they vol­unteer is sometimes similar to the difference with some couples between courtship and marriage. Before the wedding the groom is all flowers and candy; after the wedding he becomes Mr. Grumpy.

Don’t become Mr. or Mrs.Grumpy to your volunteers. Be as kind, caring and thankful to them when they have been around for 6 months as you are the first week. You can express that thankfulness to them through a variety of church communication  projects such as:

Reminders of meetings or volunteer responsibilities

You may be reluctant to do this thinking that you are unnecessarily bothering people, but we need to re­member that unlike many of us, the lives of most of our volunteers do not revolve around the church. People may volunteer with the best of intentions, but if they did not write down all the details after perhaps signing up in the church lobby to do something, it is so easy to forget all about it.

Sending out postcards or emails  a few days ahead of any volunteer meeting or can be a great way to serve your volunteers. Say something like:

“Thanks so much for vol­unteering to serve on the missions com­mittee! We will be meeting 7-9 PM Thurs­day night, December 8 at the Jones house on 5555 Any Street. We’ll be looking for­ward to seeing you.”

You don’t even have to change the card  or email month to month, just change the date and send them out again. Your vol­unteers will love you. One church secre­tary in my seminars said at the end of each month she took several hours to go over the calendar for the coming month. She made up postcards, mostly just changing the date from the previous month reminding everyone of all the vari­ous meetings going on at the church. It didn’t take long to produce them doing them all at once. After they were pro­duced (mostly just on the ink jet printer with the light weight card stock), she filed them in an index card box according to the day they needed to be sent out. For example on the 5th she might send out no­tices for the coming week for the elders meeting, the mission committee and the choir prayer team. Volunteers loved this and people were much more consistent in showing up for meetings.

You can do the same thing if you send out email reminders. Programs like Constant Contact (and all other bulk email programs today) have a feature that allows you to create emails and schedule ahead for when you want to send them out.

Find out how people want to be reminded

If we could send out only postcards or only emails, it would certainly make life easier for church communicators. But unfortunately, we are in a time of multi-channel communication with lots of ways to communicate and lots of people preferring different methods.

When people sign up for a volunteer position is a good time to find out how they prefer to be contacted: email or print. It is our job to serve them in ways that make it possible for them to serve our church.

Do more than remind people of work to do; thank them

Thank you post cards are great to mix in the mailing of reminders. People love to get a personal note from the pas­tor. One way you can help the pastor is to put a big piece of clip art and preprint something like: “We are SO THANKFUL you are part of the Missions Committee!”  on the card. Just leave a little bit of white space, just enough so the pastor has room to write something short, like “Jim, we couldn’t do it without you! Blessings, Pastor John.”

Emails can also be a great encouragement and some of the online greetings cards are a wonderful way to say thank you. I especially like the ones from www.dayspring.com, though there are quite a few companies out there.

None of these projects take lots of time, work or money, but expressing your thanks in tangible ways through church communications is a wonderful way to improve your working relationship with your volunteers.

You also communciate by what you don't do—the importance of the people channel

By Leave a Comment

True story here: a couple had started attending a new church. Excited about it, when the church asked for volunteers to work at various tasks for the Easter service, they signed up, adding a little note telling how they were looking forward to doing this, really wanted to serve wherever needed, would come early to make sure they could be put to work.

A week went by and two. No response from the church via email or phone.

At the Easter service, the person in charge of volunteers by chance encountered them, "Oh, I didn't get around to calling you—I have enough people now, but do you think you could stay after to clean up?"

The couple honestly had a firm commitment to be somewhere directly after the service, but I doubt even without it, if they would have volunteered to help. Sadly, I doubt if they will volunteer for much of anything again.

What you don't do can hurt deeply

I'm sure the person in charge of the big Easter production didn't mean to be unkind, but she was. She didn't mean to make these new folks feel unwanted and ignored but she did.

This illustrates the very important power of the people channel in communication. We pay close attention to our print and digital channels in our church communications, but the people channel is equally important. No matter how great your graphics or content, if you treat people rudely (and to not respond to a request for volunteers is very rude), that is what they will remember.

Never ask for something in a church publication, if you don't follow up. Even if you have to say you have enough volunteers, have the courtesy to call and let people know.

People are far more fragile in their emotions that they will often let on and we must honor every effort they make to reach out to the church. To not do that communicates loudly that you don't care.