Recruiting and retaining church volunteers can feel like a constant struggle. You need a healthy pool of volunteers to carry out your mission and vision, but it can be hard to find people who are willing to serve. Perhaps volunteers burn out as fast as you recruit them, making it feel like an endless cycle.
Burnout, retention, and recruitment are all intertwined. If your volunteers are burning out, not only is this bad for their relationship with your church and their own faith, it’s bad for your pool of volunteers. If every time your volunteers talk about serving they have something bad to say, that negatively impacts your recruitment efforts. Inversely, if people love serving and stick around, your volunteers will naturally support your recruitment efforts by encouraging other people to join your team.
Whether you have been struggling to grow your pool of volunteers for years, or you just want to encourage more church members to participate in the life of the church through service, here are some actionable steps you can take to recruit and keep church volunteers.
Invite specific people.
If you stand up in front of your church and ask for volunteers, many people assume that someone else will respond or that you have someone else in mind. Asking everyone can be like asking no one. And the people who do respond often end up being the same people who volunteer for everything else.
When you extend a personal invitation to volunteer, you can speak to an individual’s particular skills, interests, and experience. The more you can cast the vision and be specific about the need when you talk about volunteer opportunities, the more potential volunteers will think, “This is something I care about. I could do that.”
Personal invitations will always be an effective way to recruit volunteers.
Make expectations clear.
Few things are more frustrating to volunteers than unclear expectations. If people do not know what you want them to do, it can make them feel anxious or wonder why they even need to be there. It wastes their time and prevents you from benefiting from the best effort of the people who committed to serve.
Ideally, each role should have an experienced person who can take the lead and show everyone else how to do that role. At the very least, your event organizer or team leader should meet with each group of volunteers to explain specifically what they will be doing (and how it connects to the big picture).
You can also relieve some anxiety by communicating ahead of time via tools like email or social media to answer questions, provide training, or explain expectations leading up to the volunteer experience.
It may not seem like this directly contributes to your recruitment efforts, but if people are confused about what they are doing or what you need from them, they will not want to have that experience again and will likely discourage others from serving.
When you make expectations clear, you make it easier for your volunteers to advocate for others to serve.
Focus on the big picture.
When you ask for dishwashers, table hosts, childcare help, and other roles, you are making it clear what kind of help you need, which is critical, but it can also reduce volunteering to a task. In addition to clarity about their role, your volunteers need a glimpse of the larger vision they are contributing to. Without volunteers, the big picture cannot happen. Share what that big picture is and why it matters.
Are you hosting a dinner outreach event to connect with neighbors in your community? Helping teens develop a lasting relationship with Jesus? Allowing parents to participate in worship while ensuring that church is a safe place for their kids?
You already know why you need volunteers. They are what makes everything else possible. If you can communicate why someone’s help matters, they will understand how significant their contribution is.
Make volunteering a positive experience.
Sometimes volunteering can be mentally, emotionally, physically, or spiritually draining. People might leave feeling worn out or unappreciated. Perhaps they feel like they did not have meaningful interactions with other volunteers, staff, or the people they were serving. Or maybe the job was simply exhausting.
A bad serving experience makes it harder to come back. Plus, volunteers naturally share about their bad experience with their friends, family, and small group, which can make other people feel resistant to serving too.
On the other hand, when people feel filled up by the experience, it is a lot easier for them to say yes to serve again (and to invite their friends and family to serve too). You can help facilitate a better serving experience for volunteers by ensuring your staff take on the most tedious jobs so volunteers can take the fun ones.
You can also create opportunities for people to connect with other volunteers and staff before, during, and after the serving experience. Volunteering is a wonderful way for people to feel connected and to meet others at your church. Pair or group people together as much as possible to give them a chance to get to know each other as they work together.
Honor your volunteers on a regular basis.
Whether you are writing thank-you notes, giving gift cards, or just reminding people why they matter, these actions of appreciation provide a positive experience for your volunteers and help maintain a healthy team long-term.
When you publicly appreciate your volunteers, it becomes a recruitment opportunity, even without asking for more volunteers. Every time you tell your congregation why you appreciate people and how they have served your church and your community, it reinforces what you value as a church and gives exposure to volunteer opportunities.
Volunteer appreciation does not have to take up fifteen minutes of your service every time either. Even a ten-second announcement can make volunteers feel acknowledged while reminding others that the people around them are contributing to your ministry. You can incorporate this into your announcements whenever appropriate—like after an event or a major service. Every time you do, you can talk about the things that these volunteers made possible.
A word of caution: Public thanks like this should supplement the volunteer appreciation you are already doing. Your volunteers may not always be present for these public thankyous. Make sure you take the time to privately thank and acknowledge your volunteers too.
Ask volunteers to share their testimony.
When a volunteer shares about their experience serving, people will naturally use your volunteer’s testimony as a lens into what serving is really like and how doable it would be for them. This can change the mental picture people have of volunteering so they can start seeing themselves in ministry.
In addition, there are probably a number of people sitting in your pews who need to start serving to continue growing spiritually. When a volunteer shares their testimony about how volunteering impacted them and how they saw God at work, they reveal their own growth and invite others to come participate as well.
You can share your volunteers’ testimonies through a video or a blog post (this is especially helpful if they are uncomfortable in front of people) or on stage during the service. You could do an interview to guide them toward the things you would like to highlight, or, if they are more comfortable, you can just let them share. You could use one volunteer or bring up a panel to help people see several different roles and stories at once.
One advantage with videos and blog posts: you can easily share them in other ways. Videos and blog posts last longer than a single service, and they make great content for social media or email, which you can share again periodically. You can even send them to people who are thinking about volunteering or share them with your current volunteers to get them thinking about their own volunteer testimony and what they would like to share.
Check up on your volunteers often.
Whether your volunteers serve occasionally for a single event or steadily serve in the same role for years, aim to keep a pulse on how they are doing. Take a moment to chat with your volunteers and find out what is going on in their lives, how they feel about serving, and how they are doing spiritually.
It is easy to feel like you need to solely focus on the ministry your volunteers are participating in, but remember, ministering to your volunteers is part of that ministry.
After a volunteer-supported event ends, aim to follow up with your volunteers to ask about their experience and give them an opportunity to voice any concerns. Ideally, you can develop meaningful relationships with the people who serve. Of course, if you do not have the capacity for that, you should delegate this role to another leader who can give your volunteers the time and support they deserve.
Empower your volunteers to recruit others.
Your volunteers are your best recruiters. When people have served in the church for a while and you have built good relationships with them, encourage them to invite others into the experience. Help them think about who would be well-suited for each role and suggest ways for them to talk to friends and family about it.
Word of mouth is some of the most valuable marketing you are ever going to get. What would your volunteers say right now if they told their friends and family about serving at your church? Their experience completely shapes how eagerly your volunteers will recommend (or not recommend) volunteering. That is why volunteer recruitment and retention go hand-in-hand.
You can create a positive volunteer culture.
Many churches lack the volunteers they need to reach their ministry’s full potential. You do not build a thriving team of volunteers by accident. Churches run on volunteers, and it takes an intentional effort to create a volunteer culture and recruit more volunteers.
Let’s journey together.
You don’t need to do ministry alone. You can find opportunities to connect, plus more content and conversations about church administration, at XP Summit: xpsummit.org.
