I’m currently in a blog series about creating a magnetic volunteer culture. I believe that fantastic volunteers–specifically small group leaders, are the key to a transformational student ministry. Here’s what I’ve written on the topic over the last few weeks:
How to Take Your Student Ministry to the Next Level
Today, I want to share a little about making it happen. What do you need to do to create a magnetic volunteer culture?
MAKE IT RIDICULOUSLY FUN
If you want a magnetic culture, people must love serving in your ministry. It has to be a blast! I’m convinced that in our ministry, volunteers have more fun that students. We purposely target aspects of our programming at our volunteers. We create videos that will be funny for our students and hysterical for our volunteers. We put on a leader retreat that is over the top. Essentially, we believe that if you want a magnetic volunteer culture, you must create a volunteer experience so compelling and fun that volunteers would rather be at your program than anywhere else.
Another easy way to make it ridiculously funny is swag. Give your volunteers free stuff! It keeps them happy. It makes them feel valued and it is great marketing.
If you need more ideas on how to make it ridiculously fun, here’s a post I wrote on how to pull off an epic volunteer retreat: click me
MAKE IT FREE
Step two in making it happen is to remove every obstacle that hinders a volunteer from serving effectively. One of the biggest obstacles in student ministry is money. Events, trips and retreats cost money. It costs money to take a student out for coffee.
Let’s be honest, some of the best student ministry volunteers are college students because they are close in age to students, have tons of energy and (whether they believe it or not) have tons of free time. What college students don’t have is money.
If you want a magnetic culture, remove the obstacles that prevent volunteers from doing great ministry. The first and biggest is money. In our ministry context, we have decided that volunteers will never pay for events, trips and retreats. We’ve had to rethink some of what we do in order to pull this off but it has been worth it. We’ve even gone as far as to create a fund for our volunteers who don’t have the money needed to take students out for coffee or lunch. We believe in one-on-one conversations and we want our volunteers to do amazing work so we have removed the obstacle of money for them. Make it free.
MAKE IT OBVIOUS
People want to know how they’re doing. It’s part of human nature. This is why we have grades, why we keep score and why cars have speedometers. We want to know how we’re doing.
Also, it feels like a million bucks when you know you’re killing it–when you know you are meeting or exceeding expectations. Everyone loves that feeling! So, if you want a magnetic volunteer culture, promote that feeling! Make the expectations and grading scale obvious and clear (in writing) and then encourage the heck out of your volunteers.
The truth is that most people don’t like quitting something they are really good at. When you make the expectations obvious and when volunteers know they are doing a good job, they are very likely to stick around for a long time and tell their friends that your ministry is a great place to serve. Boom…now you have a magnetic volunteer culture.
MAKE IT DOABLE
Here’s one of my pet peeves in student ministry: ministries that require too much from their volunteers. “Listen, we’re gonna need you here Sunday mornings for the service, Sunday night for the youth group service and Wednesday night for small groups. We also have events twice a month, a fall retreat, a winter retreat, a summer retreat and four mission trips…”
We all know that student ministry is crucial and we all know what is at stake but no one can pull off that volunteer load for long. You might get a few crazies who have no lives but over the long haul, you’ll only manage to hang on to volunteers for a year or two at the most. Great student ministry–the kind that truly transforms lives, requires long-term investment over years of a student’s life. You have to make volunteering doable!
In our ministry context, we keep it simple. Our program only meets once a week. We only ask our volunteers to show up for 3 hours once a week because we want them to have the time to get on the student’s turf. Our training meetings are attached to our programming. We only require 3 events per year:
- a leader/parent brunch (2 hours)
- a leader retreat (1 night)
- a winter retreat (2 nights)
When you make the volunteer load doable and manageable, volunteers feel like their ministry is sustainable. Did I mention we take the summer off from programming? Our volunteers come back after a summer break ready to absolutely crush it. It’s great.
So, if you want to make a magnetic volunteer culture happen in your student ministry, make it ridiculously fun, make it free, make it obvious and make it doable.
photo credited to Nick Saltmarsh via Flickr
