On several occasions, I have driven home from weekly programming or an event and thought, “Our volunteers are amazing!” or recounted to my husband the heroism of a volunteer going above and beyond. The problem is thinking on the awesomeness of volunteers and telling their stories behind closed doors doesn’t advance volunteer culture one bit!

You want your volunteers to recognize your community as a place where they are encouraged and appreciated. Your volunteers are incredible and you would never be able to complete your organization’s mission without them! It’s just that in the rush of making sure everyone has what they need, greeting families, and making programming happen, we can sometimes forget to say to volunteers what we most want them to hear: Thank you! You’re amazing! Lives are being changed because you volunteer!

Busy schedules and hectic programming times are what make it crucial to get volunteer appreciation and community building on the calendar! Here some ideas for how to get volunteer appreciation and community in your routine:

• Set a goal to verbally praise one volunteer every week. Watch for a story where you are awed by how a volunteer handles a situation, and tell them what you saw.
• Put aside a half hour each week where you write notes of thanks and encouragement to volunteers.
• Have your staff team wear t-shirts that say “We love our volunteers!” on a day you can call We Love Our Volunteers Day!
• Schedule an annual event where you appreciate volunteers and share stories of wins. At Parker Hill, we call this our Appreciation Bash. Every year we choose a different theme like a cruise, game show, or unique environment.
• Recruit others on your staff to join you in cheering on your volunteers. We saw special success in this when we asked members of our lead pastoral team to take one Sunday a month to stroll through the family ministries hallways and personally thank volunteers for serving.

Whatever you do, be intentional. And remember: what gets rewarded, gets repeated.

Establishing connections for volunteers takes time and effort. But I promise it’s worth it! As your organization grows, it becomes increasingly harder to “know” and properly care for the needs of every volunteer. You have probably already figured this out, but in case you need a reminder (as I often do!), you’re not Superman or Wonderwoman! Yep, I said it!  Even Jesus recruited a leadership team.

One way plan connections is having current volunteers be aware of new volunteers. A great way to help new team members feel welcome is to recruit one of your friendliest volunteers to be your go to person when a new volunteer shows up.  It sounds something like this, “I’ve been watching the way you interact with the team. People love to be around you because you’re so easy to talk to and you’re just a genuine guy!  How would you feel about being my go to person when I have a new volunteer coming to check things out?  I’ll let you know in advance when they are coming and give you a little information about them.  All you need to do is make them feel welcome by getting to know them and introducing them to the team and helping to connect them to others that may share common interests.  This role is so important in helping us keep valuable volunteers because if their first experience isn’t great, there’s a really good chance that they won’t come back.” These volunteers will become like super-greeters to new volunteers, and become a part of their the-first-person-I-met-here stories.

Another component to planning connections is to develop your next tier of leadership. Recruiting high capacity volunteers who can pour into other volunteers expands your influence and multiplies one-on-one connections. These coaches are purposed and trained to support, encourage, and show appreciation to volunteers.  Volunteers need a shepherd who cares enough for them to be intentional about helping them to connect to their wider family in your organization.  Providing people with meaningful relationships and a place to belong brings tremendous value to their whole lives.

Spend time with your coaches by investing in them relationally and teach them to do the same with the volunteer teams that they oversee.  Consider an annual one-day or weekend planning retreat where you brainstorm and plan, cast vision, celebrate the wins, show appreciation and most importantly…have fun together!  Build a culture of community so that your leaders can experience the value of it and then they will duplicate it with their teams.

Many of our volunteers already have jobs. Jobs where they spend the majority of their waking hours. The last thing they want is another boring, meaningless job at their church!  So if you want to retain volunteers, make their volunteer experience fun!  Added bonus: They’ll recruit more volunteers!

(FUN + CONNECTION = HAPPY VOLUNTEERS!)

As adults we’ve forgotten how to have fun, and tend to take ourselves too seriously. Part of leading volunteers is helping people to take what they do seriously while taking themselves and one another lightly. Fun is natural for children, who have been observed in studies to laugh about 400 times per day compared to adults who laugh only an average of 15 times day. Fun and playfulness have been shown to decrease stress and increase retention, communication, energy levels, and cooperation.

One aspect of leading volunteers that needs an infusion of fun is the area of meetings and trainings. Have you ever wondered why people don’t show up to meetings and trainings?  The answer is simple… MEETINGS ARE BORING! So here’s an idea…instead of calling these times together meetings or trainings, call them parties or come up with another creative name.

So what makes a great volunteer “party” and how can you ensure that 90-95% of your volunteers will attend? Here’s a few key ingredients that you may want to consider as you plan your next volunteer party:

• Always include coffee, food and/or dessert (every church seems to have someone who loves to bake and loves to serve in that capacity).
• Have silly contests and give away prizes.
• Play team-building games.
• Have a theme with décor to match
• Provide play doh and fun fidget toys on each table for the tactile learners and to bring out the playful and creative side of people.
• Break out into small discussion groups.
• Include storyboarding to give everyone a voice when trying to elicit the best way to do something.
• Encourage your volunteers to dress the part and give a prize for the best costume.
• Don’t waste a single opportunity to give people value for their entire lives… not just ministry but home, work, etc.
• Celebrate the volunteers who are knocking it out of the park.  What gets rewarded, gets repeated.
• Try to schedule them when your volunteers are already in the building. (For an idea on how to do this, check out Steph’s post HuddleUP from October 31, 2013.)
• Agendas are important but what is equally important is building community.  If people feel connected and are having FUN, they are more receptive to learn, retain and come back.

The most foundational way to create community among your volunteers is to build your programming in a way that allows opportunities for connection, sharing, and friendship. Of course, most of us who lead volunteers have seen the imbalance of volunteers who spend so much time connecting that they forget to focus on the mission. That’s why it is imperative to build in moments during programming that are designed for volunteers to connect.

One of the best ways to do this, I learned from Sue Miller in her book, Making Your Kids Ministry the Best Hour of Every Kids’ Week.  Sue, an amazing volunteer guru who has over 20 years experience recruiting, training, and leading volunteers, encourages ministry leaders to start every volunteer time with a V.I.P. Huddle.

V.I.P. stands for Vision, Information, and Prayer. At GT, volunteers come 30 minutes before programming begins, so we can gather for 15 minutes. I know what you’re thinking already, “My volunteers don’t even arrive on time, so there’s no way they’ll come 30 minutes early!” I know how you feel because I felt the same way but do you know what I found?  Like anything worth doing…it takes a little time and a lot of vision for this to come to fruition.  It doesn’t happen overnight but it does happen if you include a few ingredients… coffee, grub, fun, connection, prayer, last minute details, and did I mention fun!

As your volunteers get to know one another inside of your V.I.P. Huddle, you will begin to notice them connecting in your hallways too. They will begin e-mailing during the week to follow-up on prayer requests, and meeting up during the week to pursue hobbies they discovered they have in common.

One of my volunteers, Brinda, was going through an especially difficult time with family concerns at home. when I asked her if she needed to take a break from volunteering, she exclaimed, “NO WAY!  These people (her fellow volunteers), are what keep me going.  They’re my support system, they’re the ones who pray for me each week and have made meals for our family, they love me and support me better than my own biological family sometimes.  I don’t know what I would ever do without them.  I’m not going anywhere!”

In the book of Genesis, we read the account of creation. God created man and as He stepped back to admire what He had done, He commented that His incredible creation is not only good, but “very good.” Yet, shortly after this, God said that it’s not good for man to be alone so he created a companion for Adam. That’s proof from the beginning of the world; from the beginning of time, that we are relational beings who naturally crave community and were born to partner together to do great things for God. It’s all a part of God’s design.

Jesus modeled this so well. He didn’t need to recruit the 12 disciples. Think about it… He was completely capable of accomplishing all that He needed to without their help. But instead, He spent years building meaningful relationships with them, praying with them, partying with them, encouraging them, teaching them, and my favorite… breaking bread with them! He told fascinating stories and asked thought provoking and many times controversial questions that took them deeper in their relationships with not only Him, but one another. I really believe that this is what made them stick by His side when life got crazy and times got tough. (Okay, quit judging… so there was a time or two when they got a little scared and hid like little sissies but I’m not convinced that I wouldn’t have done the same thing considering the circumstances.)

If all of that is true, and we believe that it is, then our organizations should exude the value of community as well. We should do everything in our power to create an environment where people feel a genuine sense of belonging. The truth is that creating community is not really optional; it’s imperative, in order to create a culture where volunteers stick for the long haul.

So if we’re created for community, how do we create community in our organizations? Keep reading in the weeks ahead as we reveal four strategies for creating community among volunteers.