Hot times, summer in the city … Summer is here alright, in the cities and yes, even in the suburbs. With summer come popsicles, water balloons, vacations, and so much more. But what goes? All of your regular children’s ministry volunteers, of course. So while you lament the state of your ministry over a glass of cold lemonade, let me share with you how the children’s ministry (Promiseland) at our church set out to cure the summer volunteerism blues.
For many years now we have given all of our regular, weekly volunteers the summer off. Many children’s ministries do the same thing. Those leaders who serve week in and week out giving their all to bring kids closer to God deserve a break. We have found over the years that by giving our volunteers time off in the summer, they come back rested, rejuvenated, and ready to serve faithfully for the next ministry year.
So while the regular volunteers enjoy the R & R, who is with the kids in children’s ministry? Other volunteers, of course. So now the key question becomes: How do we recruit people to serve in our children’s ministry during the summer?
Here’s a look at the six-step approach we took to make summer 2006 “A Big Win” for volunteerism in Promiseland.
1) PLAN
Have a plan. A simple, yet often overlooked step. Starting right after the new year, with snow up to our ankles, our team began to think about and plan for summer. While much of the final plans of our summer strategy were not finalized or implemented until May, it proved imperative to our success that we start early. With time, not only can you sit with ideas, concepts, and strategies before you have to sign off on them; you also have the benefit of getting other ministries and your pastor involved—without anything having to be last minute. Don’t be in denial and arrive in a season unprepared. Instead, anticipate the truth: you need new volunteers for summer (or the start of a new ministry year).
Your plan should include key activities for recruitment, who will implement these activities, how the activities relate to one another and all come together towards a common goal, and how you will measure success. Your plan can also include a theme for your recruitment drive (more on ours later) that you will carry through the entire season—maybe even beyond—and a plan for celebrating, training and retaining summer volunteers.
Once your plan is set, all that’s left is to put it into action. It’s time to move it off paper and onto reality.
2) ENLIST
Enlist the support and buy-in of your senior pastor/lead pastor first. Your senior pastor should be the first person you recruit. Through a one-on-one meeting, the leader of your ministry should clearly and compellingly paint the vision for your summer program. Let your Senior Pastor know: a) what has been accomplished by your regular leaders over the course of the ministry year, b) why they deserve a break, c) who and how you want to recruit to replace them, d) what he or she can specifically do to contribute to your plan and finally (and perhaps most importantly) e) how this will benefit the rest of the church. Here’s the best result that comes from having your senior pastor on board and clearly asking for his help—you have just recruited the single most influential person in your church to be your spokesman. Not a bad start!
Early on, our children’s ministry director sat down with the lead pastor of our church to paint the vision, need and reality of our summer. He started by sharing with our pastor something that our team was wildly celebrating: the number of kids who had said yes to Jesus over the course of the ministry year. At the end of the day, the thing that truly matters most to our ministry is whether or not kids are meeting Jesus. He shared to our pastor that our decision to give volunteers a summer break and bring in new, fresh leaders to influence our kids is motivated by our desire to maintain the ministry’s energy to help kids know Jesus and give them an opportunity to follow Him. Next, he produced statistics that would help our pastor understand the reality of the situation. If your pastor knows the number of volunteers who will take time off, how many people are needed to fill the empty shoes, and the number of kids you expect will walk through your doors, you can bet he will take notice of the situation. Numbers and statistics are hard to ignore. Finally, our director clearly laid out what we needed from our pastor in order to make our efforts a success.
It would be crazy if it weren’t true, but our lead pastor agreed (with excitement) to:
-make a video where he spoke about the importance of parental involvement and our upcoming salvation weekend (great main church service PR!),
-make an announcement of the number of kids who had accepted Jesus this ministry year and encouraging the congregation to celebrate with Heaven,
-give two main stage announcements for summer serve to the whole congregation during successive weekend services, [click here to read]
-partner with the children’s ministry to plan our church’s Memorial Day service to feature child dedications and fifth-grade graduation, [click here to read article]
-and a mid-summer announcement reminding the congregation to sign up to serve in the children’s ministry.
Amazingly enough, almost anything can happen if you just ask.
3) IDENTIFY
I’ve heard it said that “a program that targets everyone reaches no one.” Keep this truth in mind as you decide who the audience is for volunteer recruiting. Only saying “the people in church” isn’t good enough. Be specific. Think of different groups of people and ministries in your church. When the church is broken down into smaller categories, you can think selectively about a group while you brainstorm the “how” part of recruitment.
This year, we separately targeted four groups of people to serve in our children’s ministry over the summer. The groups ranged from wide to very narrow:
-The main church congregation
-Our ministry’s special events team (those who have served on holidays)
-High school and 20-something population
-Parents of children in our ministry
4) CREATE
Design specific recruitment methods and messages for your different target audiences. Once we decided the four groups of people we would target, we went after them.
The main church congregation received four pastoral announcements. While most ministries will agree that a main service announcement is to be highly coveted, determining what to say and who should say it remains somewhat of a mystery. Our conclusion is a straight-forward, from the heart, clear request from the pastor will deliver the best results. Congregants already respect the pastor, they already believe what he or she says and they are more likely to do what he asks than anyone else in the entire church.
Our special events team is actually a list of people who have served in Promiseland at one time or another (Christmas, Easter, last summer). While we have many faithful volunteers who serve at every special event, we have many more that choose only one event. This summer we sent them an email and then a letter specifically written to this audience. The email contained a link to sign up electronically. The letter included a no-postage-necessary reply card for them to respond and sign up for specific weekends during the summer. [Click here to read Special Event Letter]
To target the high school and 20-somethings groups, we approached them during their main services through their pastors communicating the opportunities available to serve kids during the summer. We sent children’s ministry team members who have experience working with teens, college students, and young adults to answer questions and distribute information outside of these services.
Finally, our parent group! This year, parents were the main target in our plan. Our goal was to see each parent facilitate their child’s small group for a few weekends this summer. Aggressive? Sure. But also necessary. We made a big decision to keep our kids in their assigned small groups throughout the summer so they could enjoy Promiseland with the same friends they have been in a group with all year long. This created a larger than usual need for summer help, so we knew our push to the parents would have to be strong. Our first move was to let the kids ask their parents. We designed a couple of fun, age-appropriate invitations for children to decorate and give to their parents. The invitation explained the new summer small group plan and laid out the need for parents to assist by facilitating their child’s group. About a month after the kid-decorated invitation, we sent a reminder postcard to all the parents encouraging them that there is still time to get involved with Promiseland this summer. [Click here to read a Reminder Postcard]
5) OPTIMIZE
Time, choice, flexibility, and availability are key terms to keep in mind as you create a summer recruiting plan. Seek to optimize the different ways people hear about opportunities to serve as well as how people can respond to those opportunities.
Think of as many options as possible for people to sign up, and then make all those avenues available plus one extra for good measure! Every time we had a main service announcement, we set up a booth outside of the auditorium with staff and volunteers to represent Promiseland, answer questions, and help people sign up to serve. There were also options of emailing, visiting the web, and a telephone number to call to sign up. We had 6-8 weeks of active recruiting that allowed people sufficient time to respond. Our continual presence over those two months also served as a clear reminder about our summer program.
6) PLAY
So, what’s left after you’ve planned it all, done it all, and seen it all come together? Now it’s time to make it fun. But, it’s been fun all along, hasn’t it? Always remember, people come because there is a need but they will stay if they feel connected and they had a good experience. That said; spend time to create an exciting atmosphere for your volunteers.
Our summer “fun” tied into our summer recruitment theme and a volunteer push we are planning for the fall called “A Big Win!” At every service throughout the summer, each volunteer will enter his or her name in a drawing. At the end of the weekend, we pick a card from those collected during each service and they become that week’s “big winners.” We publish the names of the winners in our church’s mid-week bulletin where all our summer volunteers will know to look to see if they won. The prizes change each week: baseball tickets, restaurant gift certificates, movie gift packs. We made a giant board in our main children’s ministry area to list the winners’ names all summer. At the end of the summer, all the cards from all the weeks will be entered into one grand prize drawing. Talk about excitement! The buzz is big. People see the “A Big Win” section in the bulletin, pass signs as they walk around, hear people talk about it, and they want to know what it means. One of the big wins about the “Big Win” campaign is that the entire program will cost our ministry less money than giving every volunteer a small candy bar as thank you gift for serving. Hmmm … Less money plus greater impact—give it some thought.
We are looking forward to leveraging this theme at the end of summer when we will send a communication piece to all of our summer volunteers and tell them the reality about the “Big Win.” For what they have done in the lives of kids over the summer, they are all Big Winners. And they can continue to win by serving in Promiseland during the next ministry season.
With a little planning, identifying, creating, optimizing, and fun, recruiting volunteers for the summer can become a “Big Win” in any ministry. And not just for the summer. This approach applies to recruiting any time of year.
Ashley Cornelius is the director of volunteerism for Promiseland, the children’s ministry of Willow Creek Community Church.
Copyright © 2006 Promiseland.
