Communications for a good continuing relationship with your volunteers

Every church is desperate for volunteers. It's not only important to effectively recruit them, but after they are recruited, it is equally important to work hard to keep them. Unfortunately, the difference between how we treat volunteers when we are recruiting them and after they vol­unteer is sometimes similar to the difference with some couples between courtship and marriage. Before the wedding the groom is all flowers and candy; after the wedding he becomes Mr. Grumpy.

Don’t become Mr. or Mrs.Grumpy to your volunteers. Be as kind, caring and thankful to them when they have been around for 6 months as you are the first week. You can express that thankfulness to them through a variety of church communication  projects such as:

Reminders of meetings or volunteer responsibilities

You may be reluctant to do this thinking that you are unnecessarily bothering people, but we need to re­member that unlike many of us, the lives of most of our volunteers do not revolve around the church. People may volunteer with the best of intentions, but if they did not write down all the details after perhaps signing up in the church lobby to do something, it is so easy to forget all about it.

Sending out postcards or emails  a few days ahead of any volunteer meeting or can be a great way to serve your volunteers. Say something like:

“Thanks so much for vol­unteering to serve on the missions com­mittee! We will be meeting 7-9 PM Thurs­day night, December 8 at the Jones house on 5555 Any Street. We’ll be looking for­ward to seeing you.”

You don’t even have to change the card  or email month to month, just change the date and send them out again. Your vol­unteers will love you. One church secre­tary in my seminars said at the end of each month she took several hours to go over the calendar for the coming month. She made up postcards, mostly just changing the date from the previous month reminding everyone of all the vari­ous meetings going on at the church. It didn’t take long to produce them doing them all at once. After they were pro­duced (mostly just on the ink jet printer with the light weight card stock), she filed them in an index card box according to the day they needed to be sent out. For example on the 5th she might send out no­tices for the coming week for the elders meeting, the mission committee and the choir prayer team. Volunteers loved this and people were much more consistent in showing up for meetings.

You can do the same thing if you send out email reminders. Programs like Constant Contact (and all other bulk email programs today) have a feature that allows you to create emails and schedule ahead for when you want to send them out.

Find out how people want to be reminded

If we could send out only postcards or only emails, it would certainly make life easier for church communicators. But unfortunately, we are in a time of multi-channel communication with lots of ways to communicate and lots of people preferring different methods.

When people sign up for a volunteer position is a good time to find out how they prefer to be contacted: email or print. It is our job to serve them in ways that make it possible for them to serve our church.

Do more than remind people of work to do; thank them

Thank you post cards are great to mix in the mailing of reminders. People love to get a personal note from the pas­tor. One way you can help the pastor is to put a big piece of clip art and preprint something like: “We are SO THANKFUL you are part of the Missions Committee!”  on the card. Just leave a little bit of white space, just enough so the pastor has room to write something short, like “Jim, we couldn’t do it without you! Blessings, Pastor John.”

Emails can also be a great encouragement and some of the online greetings cards are a wonderful way to say thank you. I especially like the ones from www.dayspring.com, though there are quite a few companies out there.

None of these projects take lots of time, work or money, but expressing your thanks in tangible ways through church communications is a wonderful way to improve your working relationship with your volunteers.