Okay everyone. I need some ideas and suggestions.
This year, we are having five Christmas Eve services. Two on the 23rd and 3 on the 24th. In years past, we’ve had some services fill up more than others, but none of them packed to the gills. We’re providing programming for kids up to Kindergarten.
As a church we’ve been throwing out the idea of ticketing the services. Families will have to pick up tickets before the service to “reserve” space. We will open the doors to the auditorium 30 minutes before the service for people with tickets and it is open seating 15 minutes before the service begins. From what I’ve heard, Gateway has experimented with ticketing before. Some people on my Kids staff have indicated that they planned on more kids than actually showed up. Although that is good, they didn’t feel that the tickets really helped them know how many to plan for.
What do you think? Have you used “ticketing” or something like this before? Are there any things you’ve done to predict the number of kids who will attend? I’ve got my own idea of something I was moving forward with, but I’m not sure I can do it along with ticketing. I hope that some of you who experience massive crowds for Christmas and Easter can throw out a few ideas.
I guess I’m one of the lucky ones, because we have such a short Christmas Eve service that we don’t offer any kind of Children’s Programming…
We had 12 Christmas services every year and 8 Easter services and we too offered tickets. By offering the tickets it gave us some sort of an idea of what we could expect crowd wise but as you know it’s always a shot in the dark. I too offered programming for birth-kinder. The earlier services (noon to 4pm) would be the least attended while the later services were completely packed. I would rather be over staffed than under. We started our staffing for both Christmas and Easter 6 weeks out followed up with phone calls and confirmed w/postcards for the day/days and service times they selected to serve. I also offered babysitting for the volunteers who served more than one service for children birth-5th grade. We also turned one of the elementary auditoriums into a party central room which was tons of fun. The volunteers really loved it and they in turn would end up cooking some awesome food for the team. It ended up being such a huge spread of food that the production team of the main house came in and partied with us. When word got around about all the food we had and of course wassil and hot chocolate, volunteer recruitment wasn’t a problem. Yes, we would be completely exhausted but you could bet that we were having fun along the way! Some of my greatest memories came from the insanity of umpteen million holiday services but the relational impact this had on all of us was priceless!