19 May Summer in Children’s Ministry – Part 3: Recruiting a Summer Team
This post is part of a series about summer in children’s ministry. Specifically, this series will address:
- Changing the Pace During Summer
- Opportunities that Summer Programming Present
- Recruiting a “Summer Team” of Volunteers
- Scheduling and Implementing a “Summer Team” of Volunteers
Come Join Our Summer Team!
Each year, around the end of May and beginning of June, we start recruiting for our Summer Team. We utilize a Summer Team for a variety of reasons that you can read about in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.
Our recruiting process includes vision casting/announcements during our main service, blurbs in our program each week, social media plugs, and of course word-of-mouth. As we cast vision for our summer team and summer programming, we use the following “selling points.”
- Summer Team is a great first serve opportunity
- There is no experience necessary
- Summer Team leaders are temporary positions (they end at the end of summer!)
- Summer Team is a good chance to “get your feet wet” and see if this is a place you might want to serve on a regular basis.
- Summer Team gives you an opportunity to serve the leaders that serve your kids each week throughout the school year. You’ll be giving those regularly scheduled leaders a much-deserved rest.
We can sell the Summer Team Experience this way because of the way the summer series are structured. As stated in the first two posts of this series, the large group experience during summer is video driven and is intentionally longer. This means there is less time that small group leaders need to lead or facilitate follow up activities. In addition, the follow up activities are strategically simpler than our regularly scheduled small group curriculum, affording even those who are scared to “teach/lead” young kids the ability to run the activity. Sharing these points help people who would have never considered serving with kids, think twice about the possibility.
Nick Blevins wrote a great post about the creation of our summer team. It goes into a bit more detail than I have in this post, so I encourage you to check it out here.
Kids – Our Best Recruiting Tool Yet!
Last spring, we created a video using a group of kids from our Children’s Ministry. This video was one of our promotion tools and helped us recruit leaders to our summer team. We showed it on a Sunday morning in June – during the main service – and we posted it on our social media sites (with permission from the parents of course!) It was so much fun and really got people excited about serving. We had one of our largest summer teams ever and better yet – a bunch of those leaders stuck and have been serving in our children’s ministry environments all year long. They gave our regularly scheduled leaders a break last summer, and now we are recruiting again to give them a break this year! Good stuff.
I’ve included this video for you to see. It was actually pretty simple to put together.
- We wrote the script and chose 10 kids from our ministry that we knew would be a good fit for each line.
- We asked parents to video their child (children) saying their assigned line on their smart phone.
- Parents e-mailed or texted the video to our graphics artist.
- Our graphics artist put the footage together in video format and added moving graphics, sound effects, etc.
While our graphic arts guy got the bulk of the work in creating this video, it involved no video shooting time or set design for the video shoot. Often, this can be the most difficult and time consuming part of a video promo, so this was a huge win for us all around.
We loved this video. Hope you will too…
Do you recruit new volunteers throughout the summer? Jump into the comments section and tell us about your plan!
