A few years back, I had a big event coming up and was drumming up volunteers. I reached out to a family that had helped in the past and made my pitch. To my surprise, they were very angry with me and the church! I soon discovered they’d left the church 6 months earlier, and I was the first person to reach out to them. Needless to say, I didn’t get any new volunteers with that phone call.
But it left me with a question. How can I make sure this doesn’t happen again? There are many things you can do. But there is one essential system to help you keep track of all your people, a digital check-in system.
I’ve long been an advocate for these. I’ve written two different posts on how to deploy check-in systems in your area. This one is general, and this one is specific to Planning Center. While any check-in system helps with security, you can also leverage it to help you with one of your most important jobs as a ministry leader.
Pastoral Care.
John Maxwell frequently says that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. But I’ll be honest, I don’t naturally tend towards caring for people. I’m a task-oriented person and would much rather dig into data than make a phone call. However, it’s essential to the job.
So even if you’re great at pastoral care, your check-in system can help you make sure no one slips through the cracks. Throughout this post, I talk about how I leverage Planning Center to help me manage my pastoral care. However, any good Church Management System can do the same for you. Here’s how.
1. First timers
You have a first-time guest show up. Great! Did you get their name? Phone number? Address? Birthday? A kids info card should have all those things. I talk about mine here. And every first-time guest, especially a kid, should fill one out before they enter your area.
But just collecting this information is not enough. You need to do something with it. I like to put them in my follow-up process I outline here. There are several steps I follow to make sure they had a great time and want to come back.
In Planning Center, I have an automated list that pulls every new profile created over the week and puts it in my Guest Follow-up Workflow. Then on Monday morning, I get an email with new cards to process. Each step of that workflow makes sure that person doesn’t slip through the cracks and is welcomed back.
2. Missing people
Going back to that fateful phone call, I realized that I needed a system to keep track of who’s coming and, more importantly, who’s not. It’s easy in kidmin because we check in every kid that comes through our doors. But for adults, it’s a little more complicated.
At my current church, we have one volunteer who knows just about everyone. He stands in the lobby and checks in everyone he sees with an iPad running Planning Center Check-ins in Roster mode. It’s easy for him because we’re fewer than 100 people, so for a larger church this may not scale. But I think you could with a few well-informed volunteers.
Regardless, by Sunday afternoon, I know everyone who checked in that morning. Then I have Planning Center run another automated list overnight that pulls all the people who have attended at least 3 times in the last 6 months but have missed the last 3 weeks. I ran the same list when I was in day-to-day kidmin. Planning Center then automatically puts the missing people into a workflow that walks me through follow-up just like my first-time guests.
When I call these people, I tell them that I miss them and ask if I can pray with them about anything. Sometimes they’re sick and haven’t told us. Sometimes they’ve been on vacation. Sometimes life got in the way. And sometimes they’ve left the church. I’d never know if I didn’t call them and find out. I talk more about it here.
I’ve found following up with them this way has been my best retention tool. I’ve had families come back after months, just because I kept checking in.
3. Birthdays
One of the most important days in a kid’s life is their birthday. You should celebrate it. That’s why I like to collect each person’s birthday and then send them some kind of note. When I was in day-to-day kidmin, I sent them a video on their birthday week wishing them a happy birthday. I outline how I did that here.
In my position now, I send a handwritten birthday card at the beginning of the month. I’d like to send a video over email or a card with a QR code to a video, but I haven’t taken the time to make a video yet.
Either way, the most consistent feedback I get is people thanking me for reaching out on their special day.
Just like the other two systems, this one has an automated list that pulls next month’s birthdays on the final week of the previous month. This gives me time to prepare the notes or video and send it off before the earliest birthdays. Ten to thirty minutes of writing goes a long way in showing how much you care.
None of this would be possible without a check-in system. You could try to do it by hand, but you’ll limit yourself to just the few you can handle. Each of the systems I’ve outlined here works for churches of hundreds and thousands. I know because I’ve used them there. Set up the systems you need to care for your people, and they’ll be with you for a good long time.
A few years back, I had a big event coming up and was drumming up volunteers. I reached out to a family that had helped in the past and made my pitch. To my surprise, they were very angry with me and the church! I soon discovered they’d left the church 6 months earlier, and I was the first person to reach out to them. Needless to say, I didn’t get any new volunteers with that phone call.
But it left me with a question. How can I make sure this doesn’t happen again? There are many things you can do. But there is one essential system to help you keep track of all your people, a digital check-in system.