Beyond Easter Scheduling: Tips for connecting with volunteers

Easter is one of the most exciting times of the year! It's also an opportunity to connect with members in a deeper and more meaningful way. Whether it’s veteran volunteers or occasional attendees, it’s important to make people feel engaged and valued. Given many of the unknowns this year, here are some suggestions on how to go beyond just scheduling and keep volunteers engaged.

Leverage Past Experience to Plan

Easter will probably look a little different this year—check in with your local ordinances to get a sense of what your worship options look like. With Christmas under your belt, you should have a good idea of what worked for your organization so you can begin to formulate your Easter schedule. Once you know how many services you are offering, when, and in what format, you can begin setting up your ministry schedule.

Plan for how many volunteers you will need for each service. You may need some extra volunteers to help with sanitation and COVID-related protocols, or additional lectors for a virtual service. If you’re a Ministry Scheduler Pro user, you can send out a personalized email to your volunteers to find out who is able to serve in what capacity.

• Use your Christmas experience to guide your Easter planning
• Consider the extra roles you may need volunteers for
• Personalize outreach

Anticipate Uncertainty

Expect plans to evolve until the last minute. To reduce the amount of turbulence this uncertainty can cause, begin planning for Easter early. This will allow you to identify any questions you have about your Easter scheduling well in advance of your services, and get them answered before crunch time.

Volunteer availability has been ever-changing over the past year, so it can be helpful to recruit a few extra hands for each service. This can be a great opportunity to engage new volunteers, or to re-engage people who haven’t served in their ministry in a while. With Ministry Scheduler Pro, volunteers can submit and edit their availability at any time, allowing you to stay up to date on your ministry schedule.

• Identify potential gaps in your plan early
• Expect plans to evolve until the last minute

Communicate With Your Team

Keep lines of communication open with your team. The more in the loop everyone feels, the more responsive they will be to your volunteer requests and the more valued they’ll feel as team members. Open and regular communication also results in more informed volunteers, leading to smoother services - an important objective for busy weekends like Easter!

It’s especially important to engage the team members who have been unable or unwilling to serve, so that they are eager to re-engage as soon as they are ready. Use Ministry Scheduler Pro to send out custom emails and texts with signup links. You can also encourage your volunteers to reach out to members of the church community who might be interested in volunteering for the first time, to see if they’d be interested in participating in the Easter ministry. If they enjoy it, they could become regular members of your volunteer group.

• Communicate openly and regularly
• Reach out to volunteers who haven’t served in a while, and potential new volunteers
• Centralize your communications to stay organized

Tie It All Together

You’ve got this! By using your past experiences to plan, anticipating uncertainty, and communicating regularly with your volunteers and your church community, you’ll help your Easter services run more smoothly, and utilize a great opportunity to strengthen your church community through your volunteer ministry.

Ministry Scheduler Pro can help you create and maintain your schedule, and centralize all your communications—which is a great way to streamline what can be an otherwise complex process. Dedicate more time to the things that matter most to you. Contact our team to learn more.