Recruiting Volunteers in Small & Mid-Sized Churches
When I meet with church leaders, they are often overwhelmed by the idea of recruiting volunteers to administer their tech booth. These church leaders have had difficulty recruiting volunteers in the past. They assume that only mega-churches can recruit enough volunteers to keep 4-5 people in the tech booth each Sunday. Perhaps you feel the same way!
So is it that hard to recruit volunteers? It's not hard if it's done correctly. Even in average-sized churches it can be done (remember, the average American church has about 75 people).
Let me tell you a story about an average-sized church (Sunday morning attendance: around 80). Santee United Methodist Church upgraded their A/V system with me in 2023 to improve their connection with their local community. Before they worked with me, the music director did almost everything. He programmed PowerPoint. He ran sound. He ran the slides. He set up cameras each Sunday, then edited videos all weekend so they could upload their worship service on Monday! That’s a lot, but remember he was also leading the choir and mid-week rehearsals! If anyone needed volunteers, this music director did.
When I showed up to my first meeting with Santee’s musicians and volunteers, they had a dozen volunteers. There were easily TWELVE people there, ready to learn how to operate their new audio and video equipment. 18 months later, they had retained most of those volunteers.
So what does it take to recruit volunteers?
There are a few basic principles that almost guarantee success:
Create a space where volunteers leave feeling competent. You have to create a space for your volunteers to succeed. If they leave after their first or second week feeling like a failure, they won’t last. You’ll never build a team if you’re leaking volunteers.
For example, I often find churches that have 1 person doing 3 jobs. They may be running the slides, the audio, and the cameras. This situation makes it impossible to recruit new volunteers, because no one can learn all of that in a few weeks. You must be able to give a person a job they can learn to do reasonably well in a week or two.
Figure out which job on your team is easiest. This job is often operating the video switcher. The audio mixer is usually the most difficult job. Start all volunteers on the easiest job. Then, their first week they feel like they have learned something useful and did a good job. That makes them want to come back!
(Here’s a bonus, if Capital Hope Media is working with your church: our video switcher system is specifically designed for this purpose. You can teach someone to fulfill the role as you’re asking them to volunteer. It’s a little bit amazing!)
Invite people individually, and face to face. Invitations to volunteer through church emails, bulletins, or from the pulpit rarely work. Think about who would be a good volunteer, walk up to them, and invite them personally.
(This gets even easier if your church has an effective discipleship plan or a new members class)
If you recruit one person, try to recruit their friends also. Santee succeeded by leveraging the choir and existing volunteers in the church. These are people who already hang out together and enjoy being together. Because of this, the tech team is able to build community.
Finally, it’s important to notice the way we think about volunteer recruitment. After all, this is one of our most basic tasks as church leaders. If we think of recruiting volunteers as trying to manipulate people to do things they don’t want to do, we won’t do well. But this also misses the key reason recruiting volunteers is important: we are inviting people to participate in the life of their church! We are helping people find ways to help in the kingdom. We are offering a gift.
If you want to talk through your volunteer recruitment, I’d love to be a sounding board! Schedule a meeting with me .
-Stephen
