Welcome back to the Church Marketing Podcast. If you’ve had questions about how to recruit and use communication volunteers in your church, this is the podcast episode for you! Phil Bowdle lends his voice and experiences from West Ridge Church in Georgia, sharing from what he has done well and not so well as it relates to volunteers. We also touch on the topic of maintaining healthy relationships between the communication department and the rest of the church staff.
Show Links
- Community Questions from Mountain Park Community Church
- Phil Bowdle – Blog, Twitter
- Dave Shrein – Blog, Twitter
- Job Description Examples – From Phil, From Dave
- Sweet Process
- 4 Ways to Engage Volunteers by Phil Bowdle
- Interview with Tim Peters
- Recruit Volunteers Who Want to Change the World
- 53+ Free Image Sources for Your Blog and Social Media Posts
- Buffer – Blog, Twitter
What’s in This Episode?
- About the importance of healthy church staff relationships as it pertains to communications.
- My church is doing Community Questions where we ask people from our church to answer very safe and personal questions.
- Creating custom landing pages on your website.
- How Phil Bowdle screwed up volunteers at his church.
- Developing a core team to develop second layer volunteers.
- What has worked really well in Dave’s recruiting.
- Creating job descriptions.
- Using Sweet Process or other program to create clear run-down of task steps.
- Where to find volunteers.
- Appreciating and celebrating your team.
- 4 Steps To Become More Effective to Bring In Volunteers.
Janai
June 24, 2014
I work at an international church in Shanghai, China. During the summer attendance drops dramatically as everyone travels for visits home. To try to keep people connected with their Shanghai community over the summer we started something called the #AGIFmugshot. People take photos with their AGIF (our church) mug around the world and post them to instagram or facebook with the specific hashtag. At the end of summer there’s a prize for the best “mug shot”.
It’s a great way for us to see where various people are, and for people to have a reminder to live our our church vision (printed on the mug) to “do what Jesus is doing” while they’re on vacation. Summer has barely started and there have already been quite a few posts, so I think it’s something people are having fun with.
Dave Shrein
June 27, 2014
Janai,
What an incredible idea! I love this and I will mention it in an upcoming episode. I took a look at the hashtag on Instagram and LOVE the momentum you have going. How did you get the word out on it? It seems like a variety of people have participated and I’m wanting to know what channels you used and what messaging you used to get such a great participation?
Thank you for sharing! LOVE IT! LOVE IT!