Recruiting volunteers for the holidays–tell people what they don’t know

Yvon's note: this is an article from our archives that is worth repeating to encourage you to communicate how we need people to help with holiday events. Following are some practical ways we recruited for a successful sharing and service opportunity at our church.The article below was written when I was in the midst of recruiting and the results were fantastic. LOTS of people got involved, the event was extremely well attended, many helped, and many people were served.

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It is challenging to plan a ministry outreach for any holiday and even more so when we want to recruit volunteers to help with it. Because there are so many things to do for a successful outreach and our minds are preoccupied with the event. It is easy to short-change our congregations in how we communicate to them about what is going on and what we need them to do. People don't know what we need unless we ask specifically.

Here is a flyer we created to remedy that situation

As a very practical example of a way to ask in a specific way that will get the response you need, our Adult Sunday School Class is hosting a Thanksgiving outreach dinner. I've been working on it for some time and for it to be successful we need many in the class to be involved. Though they have known we are doing this for some time--we just got the final approval of the location last week. I needed to let the class know and to let them know what we needed  them to do.

My first idea was to simply do a PowerPoint Slide and announce it, but I knew that wasn't enough. I reminded myself of what I constantly try to teach that those of us who work and plan ministry events must always remember that the people we want to involve haven't been working on it as we have; they haven't been thinking and praying about it for as long as we have. They can't read our minds.

People need a tangible, paper, printed reminder of what we are doing and what we want them to do. Once the print piece is produced, we can put it on our information table for those who might have missed the first announcement and remind people about it in subsequent weeks. It can also be posted on the website and sent out in church emails.

We have to clearly share our vision and requests

We have a lot going on, we want people to do a number of things. Though in the coming weeks I will have specific task lists and sign-up sheets I wanted to give people a flyer that specifically told them:

• what was going on
• basic information
• our goals
• prayer requests
• what we needed them to do

The flyer illustrated here is what I came up with. The information is what is most important here and it was well-received.

It seems like we never have the time to put together things like this, but they are vitally important for as many people as possible to be involved in ministry events and outreach.

For the longer article that discusses why we decided to do this kind of outreach, CLICK HERE.