Childrens Ministry Online

Illuminate Updates

Posted on 01. Nov, 2011 by Kenny.

It’s been a few months since I’ve posted anything about Illuminate, so I thought I’d catch everyone up. It’s truly been a wild and exciting ride this year.

The Austin event is just 11 days away. I’m expecting about 500 kidmin folks to converge on the Gateway Church campus on November 12th and it’s going to be amazing. I’ve got a stellar line-up of speakers. Check it out:

• Jim Wideman
• Sam Luce
• Michael Chanley
• Gina McClain
• Dan Scott
• Amy Fenton Lee
• Jonathan Cliff
• Matt McKee

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Birmingham Illuminate Conference: Coming Soon!

Posted on 29. Jun, 2011 by Kenny.

In case you missed it, Illuminate is a new conference specifically targeted to volunteers. We’re bringing the best in Kidmin to local communities for an affordable but powerful conference. Read more about our plans for Illuminate here.

So, Birmingham is rapidly approaching. The Early Bird price actually expires on Thursday. So if you live in the Birmingham area and you are planning to attend the conference, be sure to take advantage of the Early Bird pricing right now!

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Anyone in Kidmin using Planning Center?

Posted on 25. Jan, 2011 by Kenny.

Okay, before you say yes, let me narrow it down. I’m looking for people using Planning Center for scheduling volunteer outside of just programing and production stuff. Is anyone using it to schedule nursery volunteers, check-in volunteers and elementary small group leaders? The whole thing?

Several years ago I looked into Planning Center Online and even had one of my campus Childlren’s Pastors give it a try and it just wasn’t a good experience. This wasn’t because it’s not good software, but because it seemed geared mostly toward the program and production side of ministry where those volunteers typically fill a roll for all services on a given weekend where a chidlren’s ministry will usually have different volunteers for every service. It seemed workable, but not worth the hassle.

However, last week I spent some time with Bent Tree Bible in Dallas and someone from their kidmin programing team showed us planning center. Although they’re using it primarily as a tool to plan out services, it looks like they’ve developed it further to schedule all your volunteers and for multiple services. We’re totally pumped.

However, as it most things, there is more than one way to skin a cat. Rather than try this and try that, I’d like to talk to some people who are using it the way we’re looking to use it. So, if you’re using it to schedule volunteers in multiple areas (beyond just program and production) and you run multiple services, please let me know. Comment below and I’ll get in touch with you!

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When your volunteers truly get it

Posted on 17. Jan, 2011 by Kenny.

Working with volunteers can be a very frustrating experience as well as a very rewarding experience it. The frustrating parts are when there just aren’t enough, when they don’t pull through like you hoped that they would or when they just don’t care as much as you do. On the other side, it’s rewarding when they do care as much (or more) than you do and when you have a literally army of people doing great work because of a common vision. What is really rewarding is when put to the test, they do what they’ve been trained to do even when it would be easier not to or even easier to create an exemption to the rule.

Yesterday was one of those moments. Cathy Harwick, one of the Children’s Pastors here at Gateway is a stickler for safety and I know she trains and communicates our policies thoroughly to our volunteers. Near the end of the day, on of the teaching pastors came up to me to tell me about an experience he had that morning. He teaches fromt he stage 1-2 times a month, so everyone who attends our church knows who he is. He came to tell me than when going to pick up his son in one of our elementary environments, he had lost his parent pick-up tag. He didn’t realize that he’d lost the tag until he got to the door. The volunteer at the door kindly asked him to go to the check-in area where a staff member/ministry leader could confirm his ID and issue him a new pick-up tag. As he told me this, he had a smile on his face. It wasn’t a major inconvenience, but many people in his situation could have gotten frustrated. He was grateful because this volunteer illustrated the level of safety and security we value. I’ll probably share this story at a future training meeting when I’m going over that value (safety and security). It would have been so easy for that volunteer to say, “I know who you are and I know who your son is, no worries, you’re fine.” I’m proud of what Cathy’s done with her team and I’m proud of that volunteer. I have confidence that they get it.

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BRB. I promise.

Posted on 18. Sep, 2010 by Kenny.

You may have noticed a major lack of content here on the blog. Well, I took a week of vacation which was sandwiched by an out of town conference/retreat and a full-on volunteer expo. So, the dust is beginning to settle and I’ll be getting back into a regular blogging routine this week. You missed me, right?

So, what is it that’s had me so busy?

Leadership Networks Innovation Lab

My NextGen team and I were invited to spend a day in Dallas with Leadership Network to begin a year long Innovation Lab with five other great churches pushing the limits of what Family Ministry looks like today. It was probably one of the most powerful retreat/conference/breakout experiences I have ever had. I’ll tell you more about it later, but this gathering was absolutely transformational for our team.

Vacation

While I was in Dallas, my wife and Titus went on to Atlanta to visit with family (where Titus had his first visit to the urgent care… I’d already taken him to the Dr. the Monday before). I arrive to Atlanta on Friday and had a nice long lunch with my friend Matt McKee. We spent the next 5 days in my hometown of Valdosta, GA with my parents. It was very restful, except that Titus still was not feeling well at all and had another visit to the urgent care in Valdosta). My family and I almost died while caught in a horrible lightning storm while tubing down a river in North Florida… check here for the video). We then wrapped up our vacation with 3 days at Fernandina Beach on Amelia Island. That was the perfect ending to our little vacation, even if it meant one more visit to the Dr. (this time at the hospital which included chest x-rays).

Just so you know, Titus is fine. Just a really pesky cold.

Volunteer Expo

Last Sunday, we recruited more than 200 people for various Sunday serving opportunities, more than 100 of them for NextGen alone. We’ve got another week for the expo, so I’ll write more about what we did next week.

So, that’s what has had me so busy. I’ll look forward to some new conversations with you in the coming weeks.

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I need help with a report

Posted on 30. Aug, 2010 by Kenny.

Okay, I’m crowdsourcing a problem I’ve run into. I found the PERFECT volunteer report for Fellowship One. We check all of our volunteers in every Sunday. We keep up with our volunteers as well. If one drops out, we make their ministry assignment inactive. This way, I can run a report and pull up the names of only those who are active. Likewise, I can pull the same report of those who are inactive to see who isn’t serving anymore.

As PERFECT as this report is, it’s got one little problem. Actually, it’s big enough to make it report frustrating. I’ve sent in a request to have this enhanced, but I’m hoping that someone out there can help me before I hear back from the fine folks at Fellowship Tech. So, I figure that one of three people could help me out. If you’re one of these three types of people, then read on. If you’re not, then feel free to move along unless this just sounds absolutely intriguing.

• You work for Fellowship Tech and you’d like to have mercy on me and pass my request to the front of the line to have it fixed before the end of the day. (Hey, it’s worth a shot, right?)
• You’re a Fellowship One ninja and know of another report that will get me the same information (or enough to satisfy my needs).
• You’re an Excel genius that can help me extract the information I need that is already in the report, just not in a convenient way to access.

So, I’m betting that at least one of you three are reading this post and are going to have a solution for me. Here we go:

The report is M3739E. It’s a fantastic report that spits out the names, addresses and communication information of all active or inactive volunteers for a ministry. In addition, it tells me where they serve, what their role is as well as the RLC they’re assigned to. Best of all, it shows volunteer requirements, such as when they had a background check run as well as if they’re filled out an application. It’s beautiful!

However, the problem is that this report puts all the communication information in one cell. Every phone number and email in once cell. So, if I want to run this report and quickly cut and paste 200 emails, I can’t becasue all the phone numbers are mixed in as well. At first I thought this was a simple fix as I could just do a “text to columns” split, but the contact info doesn’t appear to be separated by commas, spaces or anything else… so I can’t seem to divide the individual contacts. The only way I’ve been able to do this is manually cut and paste.

So, any advice? Is there a similar report? Anyone know an Excel trick that will do this for me? I need to get an email out to all my volunteers later this week and I totally don’t want to have someone cut and paste 300 emails.

Here is a sample of the report. The names, addresses and such have been changed, but it gives you something to play with to see if you can work your excel mojo on it.

UPDATE:

Within an hour of this post, my friend Mike Niebuhr, both a F1 Guru and obviously an excel ninja created a custom fix. So, if you’re curious about using this report, which you should becasue it is awesome, then you can use this fix as well.

Insert a new column between “communication” (column C) and “work address” (column D). Now column D is an empty column. In column D2, paste the following code:

=MID(C2,(SEARCH(“E: “,C2,1)+3),LEN(C2))

This code/function will extract the email (if there is one) from the C column and put it in column D2. Brilliant, right? To quickly add this function to all the rest of the cells in the D Column, click on Cell D2 and in the bottom right corner of the cell you’ll see a little box. When your cursor hovers over the little box, it turns to a solid black “plus sign” instead of what was a “hand” or white “plus sign.” Click on it (and hold down) and drag it all the way down Column D. This will populate the function in every cell in this column.

Thanks Mike for your help!

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Question to you: When do you recruit?

Posted on 22. Jul, 2010 by Kenny.

I’ve been talking to my team about a big volunteer push. More than likely we’re going to do a 2-3 week push in October which I expect will be pretty good. A few years ago we did a really big push in January which was very well received. However, when have you found to be the most effective time to recruit volunteers? I know a lot of people like to do April and May volunteer drives so they’re all screened, trained and ready for the fall. What has worked best for you?

Tell me your story. What’s the most creative or effective thing you’ve done to recruit a boatload of new volunteers? What made it so successful? I’d love to hear some new and creative ideas and strategies that we can implement as we recruit. I’ve found that strong exposure/communication as well as creativity tend to yield great success.

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#Orange10 Day 1: Catching volunteers up to Speed

Posted on 29. Apr, 2010 by Kenny.

Over the years, I think I’ve attended more Darren Kizer breakouts than any other. He’s a great presenter and shares some great stuff!

Daren began is talk communicating about a crisis his church recently went through, when a former volunteer was arrested for molesting a child. What helped his church make it through and probably saved Daren’s job was the good documentation that was kept. All this tied into his talk as an introduction, as we recruit and train volunteers, it’s so essential to follow our processes, take our time and do things the right way. Don’t take shortcuts and document thoroughly.

Darren shared some great resources, one was a tool called the VSI which was tool that indicates people’s satisfaction about where they are in an organization. According to this VSI, there are four factors that relate to retention. When an employee or volunteer scores high in these four factors, it relates to them being satisfied and happy in their role.

• Organizational Support – Do they have the tools that they need to be successful? Are they fully resourced? Are they frustrated due to a lack of training or resources? Equip, equip, equip!
• Group Integration – Do they feel like they’re a part of a team? Are there others that they can connect with while doing their role? People need community!
• Participatory Efficacy – If people don’t see success or hear stories of success, they’ll wonder why they’re dong what they’re doing. They need to know that they’re making a difference and that their efforts are valuable to the organization and to others.
• Empowerment – Do they have a say in the game? Can they make decisions or take action? Do they feel as if their hands are tied? This is one of the quickest ways to kill a high-impact leader/volunteer.

In addition to this VSI, Darren shared a great book called 12: The Elements of Great Managing. It too asks great questions that you should ask yourself as one of your volunteers to gauge the environment you’re creating as a manager/leader of volunteers.

• Do I know what’s expected of me?
• Do I have materials to do my work right?
• Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best?
• Does someone care about me as a person?
• Do my opinions count?
• In the last 6 months, has someone checked on my progress?

One of the key take-aways for me was this: What I did to recruit a volunteers is different from what I had to do to keep a volunteer. A person usually volunteers because they want to do something good. They stay becasue they they are getting stuff out of their volunteering.

Some resources that Darren shared are as follows:

Better Safe than Sued
Moodle – a free site for setting up training volunteers
Ubvee

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Newest volunteer shirts

Posted on 01. Mar, 2010 by Kenny.

I’ve been wanting to publish this post for several weeks, but I had to maintain secrecy. It’s been really challenging trying to figure out exactly what our new Kids Quest t shirts were going to look like. I’ve gone through several initial designs but since this shirt was a gift for our volunteers, I didn’t want to post it online for feedback where a lot of my volunteers would see it (since a lot of them lurk around this site. Ha!). So, here’s what we’ve got.

About 15 months ago I launched this new shirt for our volunteers. It had been YEARS (I think) since there had been a children’s ministry shirt and the most recent one was a very, bright (as in neon bright) green. I’ll just tell you, I don’t do neon. So, the new shirts were a welcome change. The volunteers loved them. My goal was to make the design a little on the edgy side. I didn’t want your typical children’s ministry volunteer shirt.

Then back in August I launched this shirt. Although I really like this shirt, I only ordered a small number of them for staff, some key leaders and as a shirt kids could buy when they registered for our lock-in. I’m getting ready to make them available online and let volunteers and parents order them. The colors are more fun and bright (closer to what you’d expect for kidmin, but the design is still pretty cool.

Then this last weekend we held a volunteer appreciation party where we gave out our newest volunteer only shirt. The quest actually started 4-5 weeks ago, but even so, I didn’t have enough time to see my grand vision to come life. That will be our next shirt. I can’t wait. I’ll tell you more about what that one is going to look like, but you’re going to have to wait. So, this shirt was a compromise, not exactly what I originally hoped, but something I’m still very happy with. I wanted a design that would be popular with the men but still something the girls would like. The feedback so far has been fantastic. The volunteers love them! I’ve been in kidmin for years and I’ve had many cheesy shirts designed. I still have a lot in my closet (more than my wife is happy about). I’m at the point now that I only want to design shirts that our teenage or adult male volunteers (especially the ones that are somewhat fashion aware) would get excited about. So, I feel like we got pretty close to that with this shirt.

With this shirt in particular, I wanted an off-center design. It’s still hard to find screen printers that will print “over-sized” and print over collars and seams (which is what we originally wanted). Due to time limitations, we ended up having to stick with our local screen printer that could print the standard size and not go over seams. I was at the Texas State History Museum for by birthday and saw a similar shirt with an off-center design on the back, which I had never seen before. I loved it, so decided to do it for this shirt.

We printed 400 of these shirts, 3 colors on the front, 3 on the back. We had two different setup charges as we had this image for the larger adult sizes and this image for the small adult sizes. Our final cost was about $4.40 per shirt. Not bad, huh?

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Teenagers in your children’s ministry

Posted on 16. Feb, 2010 by Kenny.

As children’s pastors, we all want ‘em. We’ve all got ‘em. We’ve all been frustrated with ‘em. Often times, we really don’t now what to do with them.

Here are the various types of teens I’ve had help in my children’s ministries. Perhaps you can identify.

The All-Star: This teenager is a rock star. They’re super involved. They’re committed as much if not more than your very best adult volunteer. They’re awesome at what they do and the kids LOVE them. When you look at them, you see “future children’s pastor written all over them.” You wish you had 20 more of them.

The Fixture: This is the teenager who’s excited about serving, even if they don’t show it. However, they’re often not a lot of help. This is the teenager that misses your presentation slides because he’s busy checking his facebook in the tech booth or the teen who’s texting in the toddler room while little Jonny’s got Lucy in a piranha bite to the arm. We like them because they’re better than nothing, but sometimes we wonder if they’re more work than they’re worth.

The MIA: This is the teenager who volunteers to serve in your ministry but never shows up when you need him or her. This teenager may quit without any reason and good luck ever getting a hold of him or her. This teens is notoriously unreliable and we get so frustrated with ourselves when we’ve become dependent on them. Our schedule may show that we’ve got enough workers in every room, but half of them are MIA Teens, so we know that it’s a crap shoot. The MIA may have All-Star or Fixture qualities, but the thing that defines them is their unreliability.

Would you agree that this is a pretty good assessment of your teenagers? Here’s how these teens have broken down in my experience. All-Stars are like diamonds. You love them dearly. They’re valuable. However, they’re pretty rare. Usually you’ll be pretty lucky to find more than a handful. Fixtures and MIAs are a dime a dozen. They’re everywhere and they’re really not hard to find. Sometimes you tend to have more Fixtures than MIAs and at other times it’t the other way around. Based on my experience though, I’ve seen the fixtures gravitate toward elementary and the MIAs populate early childhood. Why? Often times elementary is less work intensive. There’s the possibility that they’ll get to hang out in the tech booth and goof off for a service. They come every week because they like it, but they’re not necessarily that helpful. The MIAs tend to gravitate toward Early Childhood. I’m not exactly sure why, but all I know is that my Early Childhood directors have often been so frustrated by them.

Tomorrow let’s look into what might really be the problem and see if we can work out some kind of solution.

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