Lessons from Fellowship: Volunteer Recruitment

Fellowship Church has thousands of volunteers serving each month. Sure, any 20,000 attendance church will have lots of volunteers, but managing that many people is beyond the capacity or ability of any church staff. Instead, they rely heavily on volunteer leaders like myself to help care for and manage the army of volutneers. I’ve experienced first hand that Fellowship does a really good job of recruiting, training and retaining volunteers.

PART I – I’m talking about lessons I’ve learned both on my own and at Fellowship Church.

Recruiting Volunteers
There are, I think, three ways for a ministry to get volunteers that want to serve and will stick around for the long run:

    * 1) Be intentional with new members
    * 2) Shoulder-tap
    * 3) Do things with excellence while being approachable

Be intentional with new members
I’ve worked with several church database software packages, so I’m very familiar with the difficulty of tracking new membership, volunteer involvement and leadership follow-up. For most churches, a software package that requires a highly trained staff member of volunteer is the fastest way to lose track of people in your church. Why? Because it takes quite a bit of training and skill to even use the software. The result is that it’s not used by many and, worse, because it’s hard/laborious/time intensive to use, those that do use it normally can’t use it quickly enough to be responsive to people’s needs.

Fellowship partnered with a company, Fellowship Technologies, to create a system that was totally different from the established database software packages. Instead of trying to count members, Fellowship Technologies choose to track people via check-in systems for their kids and volunteers – and to do so with an interface anyone could use: a web browser. This simplified approach has worked wonders, as I’ve used the system and can get the data I need – and that I’m allowed to have via various levels of administration security – to make sure my volunteer teams are being taken care of.

Today there are several companies making online, browser-based CRM software for churches, so this isn’t a plug for Fellowship Technologies, but instead an honest look at how Fellowship Church leverages technology to keep in rapid and consistent touch with visitors and members alike.

During the New Members class, the leadership presents prospective members with a gifts-assessment test (profile) to help plug people into serving where they have potentially high interest and competency. Each ministry then follows up on those people who showed an interest/gifting and go through an active recruitment process.

Shoulder-tap
One of the best ways to get new volunteers is to have your current volunteers ask – “should tap” – others in their sphere of influence. We typically know people similar to ourselves, so it’s not uncommon that some of our friends will share our interests. This one is easy, but because many media volunteers are introverts, this becomes an oft-missed opportunity.

Do things with excellence while being approachable
People want to be a part of something exciting and well-organized. Unfortunately, most tech areas I see in churches are disaster areas and look intimidating. By being clean, organized and friendly about our jobs, we can give interested but skeptical recruits a chance to see that it’s not nearly as complicated as it looks!

You’ll be surprised at how often people will walk over to the tech booth and ask about how you do what you do when you are friendly, clean and organized!

By Anthony D. Coppedge, CTS (http://www.anthonycoppedge.com/)

Anthony Coppedge provides consulting to churches for developing and growing a Media Ministry, building teams, casting vision and even choosing the right equipment. He lives in Bedford, Texas with his wife and two daughters and can be reached at [email protected].