Using Group Manager for Care Ministries: A Case Study

FTDeliverySvcs — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:34:00 GMT

Recently I was working with CrossWinds church in Dublin CA and came across a situation I had seen in the past but did not have a great solution to meet their needs. Recent advances in F1's ability to send contacts to small group leaders has provided a solution that now easily meets a care ministry needs.

The Issue:

CrossWinds Church has care teams that are regionally based around the Dublin City area and provide services to people in need. They bring meals to families that need them, they visit people in the hospital, and they provide services such as lawn mowing to single parents. Each team is comprised of a leader and an area coordinator. The leader is responsible for the group and recruiting new volunteers into their ministry. The area coordinator is responsible for coordinating efforts of the team members to provide services and report the information back to the church staff.

Prior to Fellowship One this was being done through a network of Excel spreadsheets, email notices, and phone calls which were all painstakingly tracked by the staff to keep an idea of what was going on across all of the teams. The pastor responsible for care groups also tracked volunteer activity (who was providing the meals or visitation) to keep a list of top volunteers for the purpose of thanking them and promoting the ministry.

The F1 Solution:

The first need was to track who was involved in the teams. Since the church was regionally tracking the teams I proposed that the Activity Groups be the regions of the area that the groups were divided into. This would allow for expansion of the teams or possible sub division of some of the larger teams which could include up to 80 people. The Team Leader then could be assigned at the Activity Group level and the area coordinators could be assigned over smaller groups.

The second need was to be able to take requests for ministry from multiple sources such as web, phone, and information cards. They would all be input into the contact management system in Fellowship One as contact items. Each type of request would be tracked as a separate contact item. (hospital visitation, meals ministry, service requests, etc) This would allow the church to run reports and determine the greatest need of the community at any given point and also perform trend analysis. (I.E. how many meals did the church provide in 2007 compared to 2008?)

After contacts were entered into F1 from the various sources they all routed to an administrative assistant that would validate the request and determine the best team to handle the issue based on area and type of service the team provided. The contact would then be transferred to the small group which triggers an email alert to the Area Coordinator. (See training video in eUniversity for how this occurs)

The Area Coordinator then assigns the task to one or multiple Care Team members who then provide services/meals/visitations to the requesting party. Notes are entered on the contact through the Group Manager by the Area Coordinator for each instance of service. The Area Coordinator also posts "attendance" for the team members who are providing the services. This allows the Church staff to track their top volunteers for the purposes previously mentioned. Through the process the Area Coordinator is setting the proper disposition for the contact item which allows for tracking "success" vs "failures" which are difficult to determine without contact dispositions.

The church staff runs regular reports tracking open, in progress, and closed contacts. They track open and in progress contacts to verify that the area coordinators are properly documenting and following up with service requests. They also track closed contacts for the same purpose as well as to see if any staff follow up is needed.

This same scenario can easily be replicated at your church. Levels of security for this type of ministry can also be adjusted to allow all team members to update the contact items. Training of staff and volunteers is important to the success of this ministry.

Matthew McMaster

Passionate for People Because Christ Is

Take A Census

FTDeliverySvcs — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:00:00 GMT

Attendance carries the stigma from your school days where everyone had to be in class and everyday attendance was taken.

Census means that on some interval of your choosing you stop and count how many people are actually involved in this activity. Like the US census taken every ten years you can choose any interval you want and ask "how many people are in small groups?"

To do this you need to setup your activity schedule to reflect when you want your census taken and not which days of the week your small groups meet. Consider a census on a quarterly basis; you would create an activity schedule that occurs on March 31, June 30, September 30 and December 31. The idea is you communicate with your small group leaders to post attendance 4 times in the year. the small group leader can still use the manager tool weekly for email, contacts and membership purposes within the group but you as a church only want a quarterly census to track if the groups as a whole are growing or not.

You can adjust the census dates to any duration or interval. Maybe monthly or bi-monthly is more in line with how often you want your census. You can even build the schedule on an as needed basis. Suppose you launch a new small groups’ series in September and you want a census in December you can add that date to your activity schedule for the leaders to post attendance to. Then you can add another date the following spring to see how the groups are doing again.

At this point you may be thinking how do I know when my groups are meeting if my activity schedule is set up for census taking and the not weekly meetings? If you need to know what day a group meets or even what time of day you can use Room Location Properties to track this information. By defining properties and choices and then making the associations between them and your small groups you know who meets when, where and even why (special interests).

If you are not taking attendance today with your small groups consider taking a census instead.

Jeremy Jackson

Delivering Change : small groups

Using Group Manager for Care Ministries: A Case Study

Take A Census