How to Communicate With Your Volunteers

Communicating with your volunteers is crucial. Volunteers consistently give their time and energy to the mission of the church, and it’s important to make sure they’re taken care of and kept in the loop. If you communicate clearly with your volunteers they’re much more likely to stay engaged, feel connected, and fewer things will fall through the cracks. Things will still fall through the cracks… but fewer things. 😅 So how should you communicate with your volunteers? How can you cut through the noise and ensure that your communication is not lost in the mix of all the unread emails and social media? Here are three tools to consider when thinking about volunteer communication.

Texting

I’m sure you’re already texting your volunteers to some extent— a few random texts during the week, or a last minute group chat on Saturday night asking for someone to fill in. But you may want to consider texting as your primary way to communicate. Texting has an open rate of 97%, so you can almost guarantee that everyone will see your message. No one has to download an app or follow a social media page. Everyone has texting on their phone, and most people prefer to be contacted through text.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You don’t want to start 20 text threads with your volunteers. And you also don’t want a group chat where everyone is responding, and before you know it you have 50 unread notifications. That is valid.

But there are a number of affordable texting softwares that allow you to easily send a mass text to a list of people. The message sends individually to each person, and if people reply their response only comes to you. No more messy group threads. 🙌 You can create a list of your volunteers, or some platforms even let you text your lists from Planning Center. You can schedule texts for Friday night to remind your team they’re serving this weekend. You can send personal video texts encouraging your team, and even set up recurring texts. There are plenty of cool features out there, but the main thing is that your communication is actually seen by your team. If you’re not already using texting to communicate with your volunteers, Clearstream is a texting software built specifically for churches, and they have amazing reviews.

Team meetings

Having an all-team meeting is one of the best ways to get everyone on board. When volunteers connect face to face and hear the vision of the ministry it reminds them the purpose behind what they’re doing. It gives them a chance to ask questions, share ideas, and build relationships. And if you can provide food, that’s always a plus. 👌 Scheduling a meeting that everyone can attend is always going to be a challenge. You’ll likely never have 100% attendance, but don’t let that stop you. Put it on the calendar, and send the invite. If you don’t have the bandwidth to have an all-team meeting every few months, at least consider a short meeting on Sunday mornings before everyone gets to their station. A few minutes to connect and pray together will go a long way.

Email

For years email has been the go-to tool for church communication. And largely it still is. While you definitely should be sending emails to your volunteers, you should also be aware that the average open rate for email has dropped to roughly 25%. That means a lot of your volunteers are not even seeing your emails. It’s also not uncommon to hear about a volunteer who accidentally unsubscribed years ago. 🤦 That being said, volunteers expect to receive emails from their church. You should absolutely be emailing them. But you shouldn’t assume that everyone sees your emails, and you shouldn’t rely on email as your only form of communication.

If you want to make sure your communication is seen, it’s important to communicate through multiple channels. Texting and Email are two of the best, and of course nothing beats connecting in-person. There’s no one size fits all; every church is different. But good communication is important to help unify your team under a common goal of serving and spreading the Gospel.

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