Growing Your Ministry Through…Adjustments

I’m currently volunteering my time as a training coordinator to assist ministries in recruiting and retaining volunteers at my church. We call this the Volunteer Dept, and it was formed only two months ago. Now that we’ve recently completed the step of definining the structure of the department, I would like to share what we’ve done so far. This should be a good example of applying the principles in this series, as well as how to adjust your ministry while moving forward.

Find people with passion

As you know by this blog, I’m passionate about encouraging healthy volunteers and volunteer management. For the Volunteer Dept, we needed to find people equally passionate about meeting new people and helping them get to their purpose and calling. So far, we’ve found five key people, including a manager to oversee them, to head up our call team. We also found some volunteers that would help us with data entry into our centralized database.

Put them where they will succeed

The Volunteer Dept will be the first line of contact with those that decide to give of their time to volunteer, so they are friendly and have great phone etiquette. If people had the passion but not the desire to be on the phone, then we placed them on the data entry team. This worked out, as those that volunteered had computers at home to do their work and were willing to be trained. The structure was starting to shape up!

Revisit your structure often

With the overall job roles of data entry and call team defined, we needed to define our structure. We knew that we needed a manager to handle the week-to-week call team management, but we also noticed that data entry and call team overlapped considerably. We opted to have one manager handle both job roles for the immediate timeframe, since the number of volunteers was small right now. This manager has been assigned her first major task – to document what she’s been doing so far into a training manual and training her new recruits.

Adjust as needed

As we started to dig deeper into the data entry process, we realized that there was considerable overlap with other data entry procedures. We had to quickly assess what our overall focus should be and what was outside our centralized volunteer management goals. As we started to determine what to do, we found that the department should not take on this role and that it would be managed by a different group that would be responsible for consistent data entry. This was the hardest step, as we didn’t want to let them just walk away from our team. But, it was the right decision in the end as it frees up our ministry to be focused on the mission of recruiting and retaining volunteers. We did make sure that they understood our decision and that they were still able to do what they signed up for – just with another team.

Communicate a Plan

Finally, we created a plan and communicated it to our staff and team. Writing a plan should be simple, and has been outlined here as a series in the past. Use this plan to communicate to your staff and your team about the plans for the next few months. For us, it will be to finalize the training materials, train our volunteers, and begin to educate a few ministry leaders on what the Volunteer Dept is about and how we’ll be helping them out. After making our adjustments, we were able to define a plan with 4 major milestones that allows us to focus on our primary goal. This is important!

Keep in mind that this process took us only a few weeks, not months or years. So, be willing to make adjustments for the health and growth of your ministry. Focus on your core passion and let the other things go. We did this and now we are even more focused on what needs to be done (and what doesn’t) by our team. This is a key step in growing your ministry!

[tags]volunteering, volunteer management, ministry management, church leadership[/tags]

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