Think Through It Before They Think Through It
We’ve talked before about the importance of absorbing the awkwardness for your guests. That means we want to think through their experience before they arrive in order to help them avoid any embarrassment.
But as you go into the weekend, it’s just as important to think through the experience of your volunteers. If your church is like ours, you probably roll out something new every week or so and change stuff around just for kicks and giggles. If you want to bring a vol up to speed quickly, you need to take five minutes and think about the questions they might have and the obstacles they might face. That doesn’t mean that you don’t let your vols lead, it just offers the simple courtesy of letting them know what you know.
Exhibit A: recently I overheard a conversation between a volunteer and a campus leader. They had been assigned the task of distributing a crucial handout at the end of the service. When they ran out of the document, they assumed that because they were out of the doc, everyone was out of the doc.
The problem? Several boxes of backup handouts were sitting just a couple dozen feet away. But because that hadn’t been clearly communicated, many guests missed out on something they needed.
Here are some 30k foot questions to ask prior to Sunday morning:
- What do they need to know?
- What do they need to do?
- What are we asking them to do that is different?
- Why is this “ask” a big deal?
- What happens when problems happen? (Where are extra supplies, what are our talking points, what is the emergency plan?)
Think it through. Sketch it out. Process the process on behalf of your volunteers and help them have an easy win.
