As a leader in your church, you'll want to see your church family grow and grow. With the right church website strategy, mission, and vision, we hope you can find more and more people coming to your Sunday service. But what happens when there are so many people—members, visitors, volunteers, and staff—that it becomes a bit overwhelming to manage it all?
It's a fantastic problem to have. It means you're successfully reaching out to people who are looking for Christ. But with that comes cold, hard, not-as-fun logistics. You need to figure out the best way to manage all the details of your growing church family to keep everything running smoothly.
Every church leader has their own method to their madness. Perhaps they keep a log of members, staff, and volunteers on an Excel sheet. Maybe they like to keep it a bit more old school with a binder and pen. Whatever way you choose, it needs to work. Perhaps most importantly, it needs to be efficient and you need more than one person to be able to access it.
Here's how your church management system should help you manage your staff by knowing each individual, inside and out.
It's Sunday morning, about 20 minutes before the service. Today, you're in charge of watching over the children's nursery. Seemingly out of nowhere, 7 extra kids arrive, and you know you're short-staffed. In fewer than 20 minutes, you need at least 3 more caretakers!
Have you ever experienced something like this? Unexpected emergencies come up a lot for church communicators—your church Christmas drive needs more volunteers, you're looking for the right person to set up the soundboard, Susan got sick and now you need someone to help serve food at the weekly dinner—it's an inevitability that happens to all of us. But frantically calling or texting members of your church family isn't efficient, and maybe you don't know who you can call. And it's not fair to always ask the same few people.
With the right ChMS, you would be able to just whip out your phone, open the app, select the qualifications you need to find the right volunteers for the children's nursery, and with the click of a button, you can send a mass SMS or text message to all potential volunteers asking them if any of them are around to help work the nursery—in just 2 minutes.
It's that simple!
As you add your volunteers, members, and staff to the system, they should be able to easily set up their contact information and check their qualifications just one time for it to live in the cloud. You should also be able to select if they're willing to volunteer and what types of events and tasks they are willing to volunteer for. With your ChMS, you should be able to segment these lists of members and contacts to stay organized and have it easy for you to digest.
Let's take the nursery example again. You should be able to navigate your dashboard similar to this:
1. Pull up a list of all members who have volunteered to work the nursery
2. Further segment it by pulling up members who volunteered to work the nursery and have also gone through a background check and trained. (You should be able to request more background checks from your ChMS dashboard, too.).
3. Send a mass text message to this group of verified, checked volunteers saying, "We're short-staffed here in the children's nursery. Are you in the building by chance and can help out?"
With information that's easily accessible to you and other church staff, you'll be able to find the information you need at a glance. No need to have various versions of the same spreadsheet again.