Volunteers!
I had a great meeting today with our Production Coordinator for our Union Station location. We had lunch and chatted about how to recruit more people for our production teams @ each service. We are running on about %60 of where we should be when it comes to numbers. Were thinking about doing some sort of pitch with a flyer and a booth setup in the lobby to try and put the call out that we need some help.
I am always trying to check out other churches and trying to see how they do their volunteer recruitment. Like Fellowship church actually has full-time”Volunteer Coordinators” on staff at each one of their locations. Totally cool idea! Their job is to help get people plugged into serving in different ministries @ church. Love the concept!
I Would love to hear some of your ideas on Volunteer Recruitment…
DC! or should I call you Professor Clark? I feel like I just got schooled in the ways of podcasting. Thanks! might try my hand at it. I think its great youre doing this…since you are seemingly “the man with all the answers” anyway…now you can limit how many times you tell people the same thing… just refer them to this blog! kudos!
Dave,
Part of getting recruits is building the right environment for volunteers to feel comfortable and prepared. Name your ministry. Create T-Shirts, Polo Shirts or Turtlenecks (black is preferred by this techie!) that have the logo and name of the ministry embroidered onto each one. These shirts are earned *(see below) and are only worn when the volunteer is on-duty.
Invite suggestions for the look and feel of the media suite/area. Get people to buy in to the vision by taking ownership of the space, the equipment and – most importantly – of each other (volunteer team leaders leading other volunteers).
Share the successes with everyone but shoulder the failures yourself. Volunteers only make big mistakes when we don’t do enough training, create volunteer-proof systems and fail to provide enough rehearsal/setup time. Never blame a volunteer; instead, accept responsibility for all misses and create a way to learn from them (review tapes are good coaching tools).
Organize. From startup/shutdown checklists to consistent training and evaluation to setting up a hierarchy of leaders, assign a neat-freak volunteer to help your ministry run smoothly. Remember, some of your best volunteers will be ad execs, sales people, managers, project managers and accountants who never touch a fader, spin a knob or push a button.
Recruit people with servant attitudes, not technical accolades. Every new tech recruit starts with wrapping cables, setting up and tearing down, I don’t care how much experience they have. You need their availability more than their ability. Once they’ve proved they can wrap “over and under”, wipe down equipment and vacuum up the tech area after services, THEN find out what tech areas they’re interested in. Earning a spot on the team will provide better volunteers than begging people to join the team.
Set your volunteers up for success (see above) and have fun working through the unique gifting of these invaluable people. I teach that we should be having THE most fun come service time. It should be a blast to serve while trying our best to achieve a glitch-free service. We are at the top of our game when no one knows we are even there!
Of course, there’s a whole lot more to this, but that’s all I wanna give away for free.
- Anthony Coppedge
Oh yeah, please enable people other than Blogger users (I faked an account to post to your blog) to post.
- Anthony Coppedge
Have someone streak through the theater with a hand written ad on their front and back (just like the guy did last year in the Superbowl). That would be awesome!
Welcome to blogging. I look forward to reading your site.