How To Re-Ignite Your Ministries This Fall

How To Re-Ignite Your Ministries This Fall

If your house of worship is like most, the fall season represents the start of a new ministry year filled with exciting events and programs to serve your faith community. Fall is an opportune time to rejuvenate your pool of ministry volunteers. Calling forth new volunteers encourages them to participate in worship more fully and share their faith through acts of service. This not only helps replace seasoned volunteers but it also keeps your ministries fresh and vibrant!

Consider these three tips to make this happen:

Tip 1: Recruit like a pro

Be proactive in encouraging new people to serve. Not sure where to start? Recruiting families or small groups to get involved together is an easy entry point. Invite families, small groups, or groups like Knights of Columbus to consider increasing their involvement through volunteering together, emphasizing how MSP can ensure they're always scheduled together at the same service.

Host small informal gatherings where you can identify opportunities to recruit new volunteers. Such an invitation can be a "baby step" through which an individual feels more part of the community and begins to participate more in both worship and service.

Signing up new recruits should be as simple as possible. With MSP's online enrollment forms, volunteers can show their interest in serving from anywhere at any time. That allows you to gather the new volunteers' contact info, service preferences, and availability automatically in a central database. You'll never have a potential volunteer fall through the cracks again! Just include a link to the enrollment form on the church website, social media, or wherever else you advertise for ministry volunteers.

Tip 2: Train them and retain them

Ensure that your volunteers know what's expected of them – but don't make your mandatory training sessions an ordeal for them to attend. Instead, use these opportunities to build community within your church and to remind volunteers they are a part of something much bigger. Encouraging fellowship is a must too, so plan ample social time for volunteers to get to know one another during these meetings. Solid fellowship can help build a stronger, more stable, and more effective ministry.

Have a sound plan when hosting a volunteer training event. Provide volunteers with the training and resources they need to be confident and self-sufficient in their responsibilities. Introduce them to the MSP mobile app so they can access those resources and manage their service schedules. Letting them know they have control of their availability and schedules at their fingertips will increase both their sense of ownership and their dependability.

With MSP, you can plan for any upcoming volunteer trainings or get-togethers using built-in polls and RSVPs. It's easy to see what days work well, who is coming and even see who is opening your emails. This allows you to plan better with fewer back and forth messages. You also keep a pulse on volunteer engagement, which can help with volunteer retention.

Tip 3: Get your ducks in a row

Having systems in place to streamline your scheduling process can benefit you and your volunteers. It is helpful for schedulers and volunteers alike to be able to find all volunteer information and schedules in one place. With MSP, volunteers and schedulers can view and update that information in real time. No one is left in the dark, and access is as close as your smartphone.

A dedicated scheduling tool can also make creating the schedule easier. You can avoid double bookings, keep families together, and see which ministries might need more volunteers. If you're not scheduling all of your ministries just yet, set your system up to grow with you. By bringing just one or two ministries into the program, you'll be able to seamlessly add others into the fold as soon as they are back up and running.

Volunteer retention is also more successful when volunteers have the flexibility to continue serving even as their lives get busy. MSP makes reminding volunteers of their commitments easy with automatic text and email reminders, and the ability to easily request subs and submit unavailability within the app allows volunteers more independence while also keeping you in the loop!

Use these three helpful tips to revitalize your volunteer ministries this fall – or any time during the year when a "pick me up" is needed. To learn more about how Ministry Scheduler Pro can help your church with a system refresh, contact us today!