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| Credit: Creative Commons (spDuchamp) |
This week, I'll dedicate a few posts to recruiting volunteers and building a great team. It's an area I've had to grow a ton in, and I've done so mostly through learning from my mistakes. Today's post is dedicated to how to ask people to serve on your team. When I got my first staff position as a youth director, I had no idea how to build a team and ask people to give their time volunteering with students. Here are a few things I've learned:
Ask people (including students) who they think would make a good leader. I don't know everyone in our church, and even when I worked in a small church of 150 people, I didn't know everyone even then! Don't limit your pool of potential volunteers to people you already know. Ask people you trust--including students--who they think would make good leaders. You might be surprised at the names you get. Every spring, I ask our current leaders to give me two names of people they think might make a good addition to our team. As our team has grown over the past couple of years, we've had a lot more diverse of a team than if I did all the recruiting myself. We even have a leader who has single-handedly recruited four other great leaders to be on our team in the year and a half she's been a volunteer. Cast the net wider by asking others to help you identify potential leaders.
Know the kind of people you're looking for. What kind of people do you want on your team? What do you believe it takes to be a small group leader, an event coordinator, or a worship mentor? What kind of spiritual maturity is required for each particular role you're filling? You don't want to be too limiting, but if you know the kind of people you'd like to have on your team, it will make it that much easier to identify potential leaders.
Make a personal ask. You can't put an announcement in the church bulletin that you're looking for leaders and expect to be suddenly swamped with great people wanting to be a youth volunteer. When you ask someone to be a volunteer, ask personally, face-to-face if possible, but at the very least over the phone (and I don't mean via text). No matter how busy you think you are, or how big your ministry is, there is no reason you (or another staff member, if you have more than one) can't take the time to personally contact potential volunteers. It doesn't take a whole lot of time to pick up the phone and have a short conversation inviting someone to consider being a leader. And by the way: if you can't describe the vision for your youth ministry and what it means to be a volunteer leader in two minutes or less, then you're making it too complicated.
Provide clear roles for leaders. When you ask someone to be a youth leader on your team, make it clear what you're asking them to do. Be specific about what their role will be, what the expected time commitment is, and when they would start. Most people in our culture have a ton of things going on, and if you're vague about what you expect them to do, they'll either not want to commit to you as a leader, or they'll join your team and become frustrated because what they end up doing isn't what they thought they were signing up to do.
Get an application in their hands. If you don't have a written application, you need to develop one. Yes, you are recruiting volunteers, but in a sense, they are still applying to be on your staff--as an unpaid staff member. By having an application you can give to people you are asking to be on your team, you not only have a good way to start knowing whether someone is going to be a good fit, but it adds a level of professionalism and shows that you're serious about getting people on your team to love Jesus by loving teenagers.
UPDATE: Check out the post on interviewing and screening leaders here and the post on getting leaders started on the right foot here.
Question: How have you had success in recruiting people to be on your team?
