Delivering Change : First Time Visitors

Silos… The Unspoken Barrier to Ministry

FTDeliverySvcs — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 04:40:00 GMT

My name is Matthew McMaster and I have been a Delivery Manager at Fellowship Technologies since March of 2004. In that time I have implemented over 100 churches. Some of them have been very sophisticated in how they communicate within their ministries but many of them have a real silo issue. When each ministry functions as its own separate entity with little or no regard for the larger entity (The Local Church) as a whole, you have a group of silos; not a unified team. An example of this would be when the Youth Pastor gets their new students to fill out a first time visitor card. This seemingly ordinary process is really masking a silo issue. When you look closer at the first time visitor card you will notice it is missing some very important information. What are the parent’s names? Do they have any siblings and what are their ages? What is the best way to get in touch with the parents? Do they have a church home? Now the Youth pastor might say, “That information isn’t necessary for me to reach that student.” This is a silo mentality. The Youth Pastor is forgetting that the student is part of a larger entity of the family. Each member of the family is a potential soul needing to be reached. Each member of the family is the target market for other ministries at The Local Church.

Another example of a silo that I have seen involves working with multiple ministries trying to coordinate volunteer activities. There really is a best first time visitor with children process and it involves “Super Greeters” that can escort a family from one classroom to another explaining the check in and pick up processes. These “Super Greeters” naturally come from the Greeting team which is a separate ministry from the children’s ministry. I have heard from the leaders in this ministry on many occasions, “Why do I need to staff Greeters in the Children’s Building? That is their responsibility!” This silo mentality is detrimental to the volunteers as well as potential guests.

There are many other types of silos but I think you get my point. So now you must be wondering, “What do I do to break down those silos?” The answer is deceptively simple… Cross functional Teams. In future blogs, I will discuss two specific cross functional teams but you can have many more. The first is the Fellowship One Champion Team and the second is the Data Integrity Team. In my next entry, I will be discussing how the Champion Team functions.

Matthew McMaster
Delivery Manager
Fellowship Technologies.

Contacts Week III

FTDeliveryTeam — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 23:11:00 GMT

Service Level Agreements (SLA)

There is a new question that churches across the country are beginning ask themselves: “What is our SLA to our congregation?” Does a first time visitor get a call within one day of visiting the church? Or is it more like a week? If someone wants to volunteer in a ministry how long do we have to call them back and get them plugged in to a volunteer position? One week? Two weeks? How about a month?

How can the church improve a process if the process is not documented? How can the senior staff hold their team accountable for making calls if there are no guidelines?

While working with a church staff, I asked, “Ok, who handles the calls to first time visitors”. The response I received was more like a Seinfield episode than you might expect. Each person pointed at someone else, and said he / she makes the calls. It was during that meeting that they realized there was no documentation for their process. One pastor asked “Are we even calling people?” No one could answer with 100% certainty.

When you start monitoring contact items and find contacts that have gone untouched for two weeks or longer, what should you do? If asked, the staff person responsible will probably reply, “I was getting to that contact”. Because of a failure to identify your churches’ SLA, you now have nothing to say but, “umm, OK”. If the SLA is one week then you can say, “Our commitment level to first time visitor contacts is one week. Is that time frame too short?” Are you understaffed and unable to meet our current goal for contacting first time guests in one week? Are there any key volunteers that you can get to help you make these calls?

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Can you fix a process that isn’t documented and adhered to it?”

Jeff Hook, CEO Fellowship Technologies

Intelligent Routing

One thing we briefly discussed last week is that the person getting the contacts initially, quite possibly, isn’t the person responsible for making the calls.

“Pastor Ricardo” isn’t always the right person to make the call to a visiting family. Often, the first time visitor is a teen, in that case, the youth pastor is going to make a real connection and get that teen plugged into church. If the family has 6 kids all under the age of 10, the children’s pastor is the best person to make the call. If the head of household mentions on the guest registry card that he works at IBM, maybe a key volunteer that works at IBM should make the first time visitor call. The key is to make the best possible connection with the limited amount of time you have. “Pastor Ricardo” or possibly Mary (who knows something about everyone in the church) should be responsible for receiving first time visitor contacts and then routing those contacts to the best possible call person. Other issues that Mary or “Pastor Ricardo” can take into consideration are staff vacations and current work loads. If the youth pastor is currently working 50 contacts and will be on vacation next week, the decision can be made as to whom youth contacts should be routed.

The most important thing that I want you to take away from this one sided discussion is that God has put people in contact with your church and how you handle that person can have eternal consequences. Why take chances with shoddy processes or bad practices because you have always done it that way. Now is the time to evaluate, measure, and change for the better.

Contacts Best Practice

FTDeliveryTeam — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:00:00 GMT

In this installment of Church Management I will be covering contact points. Contacts come in many different forms from first time visitor cards, prayer request cards, communication cards, bulletins, to phone contacts. Each of these contacts has to be handled in a different way. Many of them have multiple contact items on each form. So to get started I am going to define some terminology that will be used:

Contact: A contact is either a card or phone call that may contain multiple contact items. Each contact is kept intact as a whole with many parts that can be worked by multiple people. For example, a communication card from the bulletin that is turned in might have first time visitor, my age group is 18-25, and I want to know more about volunteering checked off.

Contact Item: A contact item is the before mentioned check boxes that can reside on a contact form. First time visitor, second time visitor, my age group is X-Y, I want more information about X ministry, prayer request, confidential prayer request, I heard about this church by X, and many more are considered contact items.

A common issue that I see churches facing is how to process first time visitor cards. Many churches that I work with have a tried and true way to process those contacts. They make as many copies of the contact as necessary to distribute to the ministers who will be working the contact items. In the definition of what a contact was I mentioned three items that were checked off. Here they are listed with the ministries responsible for the contact items as well as what they are expected to do with the card.

First Time Visitor (Member Services – Send Form Letter)
First Time Visitor (Member Services – Update Database)
First Time Visitor (Executive Pastor – First Time Visitor Phone Call)
First Time Visitor (Welcome Ministry – Deliver Bread to Visitors Home)
My age Group is 18 – 25 (??? - Should go to College Ministry to let them know but doesn’t or they don’t know what to do with it when they get it)
I would like to know more about Volunteering (Children’s Ministry – Phone Call)

Note: in the above example one contact item has initiated 3 actions

Now most churches that I visit say they are performing all of the above tasks to the best of their knowledge. The problem is that they have no way to be sure it is getting done. A quick visit to the Executive Pastors office and you will see dozens of first time visitor contact cards, in various states, scattered around his office.

One key to church growth comes from making the best possible impression to first time visitors. I will not be discussing what I think is a best practice for a particular item (phone call, home visit, form letter). This is very regionally based. What is a good idea in rural Mississippi will be seen as invasive in Seattle. What I will be discussing is how churches should document their process and then implement that process. That will come in next week’s installment…

Matthew McMaster

Church Process Expert

(I figure if your going to make up a title make it GRAND)