3 Ways to Build Long Term Volunteers

on January 15th, 2009

Yesterday I met with a couple of our staff to talk over volunteers, and came up with 3 guiding principles for helping take our great volunteers and turn them into long-term youth ministry gurus. The goal is to retain more youth workers, eliminating the stress of finding more leaders and eliminating the pain of high turnover and immature leadership. Keeping volunteers long term has a ripple effect in your youth ministry, both good and bad.

So in light of that, here are 3 ways to increase retention on your volunteer team:

1) Build Community
When a leader is connected, they stick. While life stage change is inevitable and there are good reasons to take seasons off from volunteering in ministry, good leaders build community with their volunteers as they share the calling of youth ministry together. There have been countless meals, celebrations, counseling and life poured back and forth. Evaluate your current ministry to volunteers – how much time to you spend with them? Do you know them? Have you gained weight together over a few too many meals? Have you journeyed with them through a loss? There has to be accessibility to you and leadership from you.

2) Plan Ahead
Every last minute bomb you drop causes destruction on a volunteer/ministry relationship. And despite our best intentions, many good volunteers have been taken out in the crossfire of our lack of planning ahead. Effective planning leads to an easy pathway of participation and allows them to plan life around their volunteer opportunities, not the other way around.

3) Move Them Toward Self-Directed Ministry
Volunteers typically move from their initial interview to directed work in a particular ministry area (work at a table at a weekend service, lead a small groups, etc). This is good for a while, but for long term leaders the goal must be for them to be self-motivated within the vision and framework of the ministry as a whole. They take action when they see a need in the ministry. They call, text, respond without leadership because they are the leadership.

JG


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Comments (9)

Ron Edmondson at 2:01pm January 15

This is very simple, but profound. Great post!

6 Rules for Small Group Crashing | More Than DodgeBall - Youth Ministry Blog by Josh Griffin - Saddleback Church's High School Youth Ministry (HSM) at 9:38pm October 25

[...] Follow-up with a nice email – there’s nothing better than an email to the leader after your visit. No matter how the night went, send along an encouraging note. This is not the time for criticism – you weren’t there to spy, you were there to celebrate. A few minutes of your evening and a few emails the next day will go a long way in keeping long-term adult leadership. [...]