A Practical Way to Use a Communication Volunteer

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We often have a hard time assimilating volunteers onto a church communication team for one of several reasons:

  1. They need to be present in the office in order to accomplish the task
  2. They need to have specialized skills to run particular softwares
  3. They need to have time to dedicate to thinking on a plain beyond checking off to-dos
  4. They need to possess a discernment that cannot be taught

There are more, but I’ve found my main issues tend to be related to one of these. However, there is one way I have chosen to incorporate my volunteers which saves me hours a month and is not simply filing or accomplishing menial tasks.

Watch the video for a practical way you can begin using volunteers in your church communication department.

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3 replies
  1. Eddie Harrison
    Eddie Harrison says:

    Dave,
    First of all, I appreciate your content…it is helpful so please, keep it coming! With that said, I schedule social media posts all of the time and I understand the importance of engaging volunteers but it seems that the time you spent assigning this task to a volunteer is equal to the time it would have taken to just go ahead and schedule the post yourself. Am I missing something?

    Why wouldn’t you just include Beth in your creative planning meeting so she could schedule these on the fly? Or…why not simply email Beth the evernote file containing all of the posts to be scheduled? It just seems like there are some unneeded extra steps here.

    I’d love to hear your thoughts.

    • Dave Shrein
      Dave Shrein says:

      Eddie,

      Thanks for stopping by. I have actually thought this same thing. As I contemplated whether or not to make a change, I took a couple things into consideration.

      1) I do not want to always be the one scheduling out copy. As a matter of fact, I want to get volunteer writers to put together social media. They don’t need to know how to schedule, just how to write. This system will allow people to focus on what only they can do. In addition, I also have multiple volunteers and staff who assign Beth social media updates too. So in this example it’s just me, but in practice, it’s the whole team.

      2) There are times where I do not want to go through the steps of uploading images, navigating windows, etc. I can live in Flow only and my volunteer can live in all the other scheduling words. It’s a rhythm that really works for me.

      3) This gives me a history of what we’ve done along with a view of what’s coming up. So, if I need to go back and grab something from the past, I can find it easily in Flow rather than scrolling back through my activity on any giving social network.

      I love your suggestion on figuring out a way to email Beth the Evernote or a doc and let her make all the changes. Very smart.

      Thanks for the encouragement and the question. I really appreciate hearing from you.

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