The Biggest Question You Need To Answer Before You Recruit A Single Volunteer

If I were to give you 100 volunteers would you know what to do with them? That’s not the big question but it’s an important one to answer.

How you answer that question will greatly impact the success of your recruiting efforts because:

• You can’t fill a need you don’t understand
• We understand some of the need. We know that volunteers will:
• Expand our capacity
• Bring us community
• Enable us to tackle different problems

And the list goes on, but how they will do all those things need to be clarified. That’s why before you recruit a single volunteer you need to be able to answer this BIG QUESTION:

WHERE AND HOW WILL PEOPLE SERVE IN MY MINISTRY?

You can as specific as you want but a good place to start is by:

CREATING DIFFERENT LEVELS OF COMMITMENT AND SERVICE

Not everyone who signs up to serve has the same gift and talents. If all you have is one type of role (i.e. chaperone) you might be trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

My suggestion is to create these three levels:

ENTRY LEVEL: This can be anything from opening doors to serving pizza. Anyone can do it and the commitment could be weekly to once a month.

COMMITTED LEVEL: This is for people who not only have unique gifts and talents, but are mostly independent. In other words they see a need and fill it on their own.

CORE LEVEL: These are high capacity people. They can serve in roles like managers and small group leaders. While people could jump into these roles it involves a little training at the beginning.

Create different levels of service and you take away the intimidation of just jumping in. People will be more interested in giving ministry a try.

IDENTIFY WHAT YOU WANT THEM TO KNOW AND DO

This can be done with a simple job description. You don’t need to do anything comprehensive just sum up their task into a sentence or two, followed by a few tangible tasks.

If you aren’t sure what a one sentence job description looks like here are a few examples:

HOSPITALITY MINISTER: To create an irresistible environment where visitors feel loved and confident they are right where God wants them to be. 

SMALL GROUP LEADER: To faciliate engaging conversations and encouraging relationships so people feel confident in who God has created them to be.

The tangible tasks should be simple and clear (i.e. unlock doors at 5pm). You want to show them that while the job is simple it’s filled with significance.

EXPANDING YOUR ABILITY TO LEAD AND MENTOR

When someone joins the ministry you need to clarify who they will report to each week. At first it might be you, but as you grow leaders don’t be afraid to tell someone you recruit, “Hey,  you’ll report to Joanne.”

This way you provide them with a person who is going to be more accessible than you. This manager or mentor is going to be able to show them the ropes and help them navigate through that first season of serving.

By growing a group of managers you also increase your capacity to recruit more volunteers. Your team will be able to clearly tell you where the need is and your job will be to identify the people who can fill them.

Building a dynamic team of volunteers takes time, but if you go beyond filling a need and assign others with a purpose the payoff will be worth it.

So before you start recruiting answer the question:

WHERE AND HOW WILL PEOPLE SERVE IN MY MINISTRY?

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