Paul Clark

Your Church Blog: Fast Ideas for Recruiting and Retaining Volunteers

Your Church Blog: Fast Ideas for Recruiting and Retaining Volunteers

Great article from Matt Branaugh about finding and caring for volunteers!

connecting volunteers with opportunities

One of the great challenges in the fall is to connect people to ministry serving opportunities. I remember a great illustration from the Network video series as Bill Hybels talked about the “Fall Recruitment Wars” that go on in many churches. It was hilarious.

At Fairhaven, we stumbled on a great new approach for us that accomplished multiple goals for less money, less energy, and more “wow” factor. We called it our “Turn by Turn” guide. It’s a departure from years past, when we held elaborate Ministry Fairs.

This year, because of so much construction, we couldn’t use the outdoor areas. Our First Impressions team came up with the Turn by Turn guide. You can download it here to take a look Download Turn-by-Turn. We treated it like a travel guide to the ministries of Fairhaven Church. It was designed to be a great launch piece for our fall ministries but also to be used throughout the year as a guest piece. We had “concierge” stations placed around the church staff to answer questions or take receipt of registration forms. All in all, we liked it better that the tents and I doubt we’ll go back next year.

We had five goals:

• Keep it simple
• Make it attractive
• Provide concise descriptions
• Provide a convenient response tool
• Follow up quickly

How do you connect people to serving opportunities?