Developing a Volunteer Recruitment and Training Plan

Today we're talking about what it looks like for you to properly recruit, train, and empower your volunteer team so you have a team that is thoroughly equipped and that will want to stay with you long term. What does that look like? You ready to learn? Get ready. It's time.

You're listening to the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast, part of the TCD Podcast Network.

Hey heroes, my name is Tom Pounder and this is the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast. This is the podcast where we talk about how you can do ministry more effectively in this very digital and online world. And whether you're a student minister, whether you're an executive minister, whether you're a digital minister, no matter what ministry position you are in, volunteer recruitment, training and empowering has always been a little bit of a challenge. We never have enough volunteers to help us in our ministries. So what does it look like for you to recruit, train, and empower them now so that you can have a successful team that is working hard and doing ministry the right way as a team? Today I've got my friend Nick Blevins on. He is a next-gen pastor up near me. He's up near Baltimore, Maryland. But he's been doing ministry for a really long time, and he just actually came out with this new book, The Volunteer Playbook, and he also works with Ministry Boost as well as his church. But talking about how you can successfully recruit, train, and empower volunteer team members. It's a great conversation. It's awesome having him on there because he's had lots of experience with this. And he's had a lot of experience working with other churches doing this and doing this successfully. So we talk about that today and what that looked like for you in your church. But before we do that, I want to highlight the church.digital. At the church.digital, we have ministers on there. People who are in the trenches, who are coaching, who are running cohorts, who are writing blog posts, doing podcasts about how you can do ministry in this metaverse world, digital world, digital world, online world. If you are doing online ministry in any capacity, you need to check out thechurch.digital because you're going to get encouragement. you're going to be equipped, and you're going to be trained on how to do this the right way. So we've got lots of experience, lots of encouragement, and I would love for you to check out thechurch.digital today so you can take your online ministry, digital ministry, digital metaverse ministry to that next level today. So again, check out thechurch.digital. All right, so without any further ado, let's get into the podcast interview with Nick Flevins right now. All right, with me right now is my friend Nick Blevins. Nick, how are you? I'm doing well, doing well. Ready for summer here in our parts of the country where it's getting warmer like that. It is getting warmer. I love, I'm in shorts and I've got a short sleeve shirt. It's a little chilly this morning, but the knowing that it's going to get warmer during the day, I'm good with.

Yep. Yep. Same here. Nick, what's your favorite season of the year? It is summer. I could almost say fall because I love football so much. So like pro football comes back on from the Baltimore area and Ravens fan, but still summer. I love ocean water. Like that's probably my top thing. So certainly summer is my favorite season.

That's awesome. So I'm assuming you must be really happy that Lamar Jackson re-signed with the Ravens.

I am really happy because at least it's settled. You know what I mean? Like that was the other thing. It's like, I mean, I did want him to sign, but the other part was like, you know, the questions and who's going to be playing and what's happening. And yeah, so I'm just glad it's like, that's done. We can just finally get onto a season.

if he would not have resigned, I think their contender status would have dropped dramatically. Yeah. The Ravens got a great organization, so I think they're going to be good regardless, but that definitely does help. All right, Nick. Well, we're not going to talk about summer or even football. We're here to talk about volunteers. But before we get into that, I just want you to just reintroduce yourself. You've been on the podcast before, but not for a while. So share who you are and what you do.

Yeah, Nick Blevins. I own staff at a church here north of Baltimore, Maryland called Community Christian Church. I'm the next gen pastor here. Also oversee our operations stuff. And it was a church plant that started 17 years ago with the help of a bunch of churches, including one. you're at right because your church has been apart how many churches have you all helped start now 100 over 100 well no we're over 300 we've helped oh my gosh that's right yeah because of the the passion for planting and some of that stuff yeah so we're another church on your list of 300 and then have been uh fortunate to even partner with you to help launch other churches which has just been really cool for this area that we live in the baltimore dc area That's been a lot of fun. So I've been here since we started. It started as the kids pastor, moved into the next gen pastor role about 12 years ago and been doing that. And then on the side, some friends and I started Ministry Boost to help train church leaders, mostly kids and student pastors. And predominantly the thing we probably help with the most is volunteers. So what we're talking about today, not surprisingly, but that's the thing people, you know, want to work on the most or need the most help with or whatever. And so that's kind of um how that's turned out and then also started working with slingshot a little bit last year to help churches hire staff most kids and student pastor staff so yeah i got three kids ten seven and four getting out of school here soon ready for summer it's another reason i love summer because we you know family trips and vacations and more time with the kids and all that stuff do you guys go to the beach we do if we've had summers where we don't in fact I think last year was one of those and I hate those summers you know because we we planned family trips and we went different places which was fun um like went to Pigeon Forge last year and did Dollywood and like all that stuff and uh but for me loving the beach that was it was that was not one of the trips and that was very sad yeah but yeah we did this year we're going to Myrtle Beach this year

nice we always go up to ocean city maryland and that's a place we've kind of grow i've grown up going to and then my girls and i go out there as well and it's funny because my girls are a little bit older than yours and so taking my girls to the beach when they were younger you have to watch them like a hawk like you have oh my gosh the last two or three years i've been at peace like they'll go down to the water i won't care like i don't have to watch them and make sure that they're not getting pulled under um or anything like that so that's been really kind of cool for me so yeah it is it's stressful my wife and i we went to the beach with the kids it was just uh so wasn't any of our extended family

we got three kids this was last year and i'm in the water jennifer's on shore the kids had gone to the two older ones had gone down like dig and sand somewhere and um when they our daughter our middle one walks back so she's by herself at this point now she's only i don't know 40 feet from where jennifer is but she doesn't see her and keeps walking you know so i'm in the water i can see what's happening but she freaks out because she walks you know and then other people are freaking out because isaac doesn't know where she is and it's like everybody calm down so you walk past

but i get but you know i get it so it's a lot to handle it's definitely stressful yes one day you'll be like me just relaxing on the beach and not a care in the world carefree yeah so um all right so let's talk about volunteers because Volunteer has always been an issue within the church. It's always been something that people are constantly looking for. And I think then the pandemic came and that kind of squashed a lot of things, but also gave us some new opportunities as well. And so that's why I think your book is very timely right now. It's called The Volunteer Playbook. And we're going to include the links in the show notes. But talk to me a little bit about why you chose to write this book.

Yeah, actually, and I started it 10 years ago. And the reason I always remember is because Isaac, our oldest, was born. I started it a few weeks after he was born in December of 2012. And the idea then, in my mind, you know, I had been doing vocational ministry stuff for almost 10 years there. If you count when I was a volunteer leading at my home church, it was about 10 years. And I learned so much from other books, from other church leaders. And so many things that helped our church. I mean, I can point to, and some of those stories are in the book, but times when like I was not doing it right, but then I learned this thing and implemented it and that helped everything. And so in my mind, I thought, I want to build, I want to write a book that's about leading volunteers. That's kind of like a from the ground up. How would you build it? you know, the right way in a healthy way. And now it's changed a little bit since then, because I think my idea was probably too boring originally, you know, it was kind of like, and some of that stuff is in the book, like the whole section on build your foundation, you know, what's your mission, your vision, your strategy, that was sort of the big, like the core idea of it. and then with the idea of thinking that there's so many things that impact volunteerism in a church you know a lot of times we think it's just one thing like we just need an announcement from stage or we just need a ministry fair in the lobby or or whatever but the truth is there's hundreds of factors that impact volunteerism and so my thought was in the book what if i wrote a book where you kind of build it healthy from the ground up and address you know most of those factors The book still turned out that way, but with recruiting being such a need and just needing more volunteers and how that messes up everything else. Like if you don't have enough volunteers, you usually don't even have time to work on anything else, you know, on your ministry. So kind of redesign it where recruiting is the first section. So you can get that going, get some new volunteers in, and then we can turn our attention to building the foundation, building a good structure, you know, leading volunteers and all that stuff. So. Wrote it mostly to help church leaders. You know, you're always going to need to recruit volunteers. There's no version of I've got 100% and now I'm set for the rest of my life or whatever. But you also don't have to have 60% and scramble and always be stressed and asking for help. plugging a bunch of holes and doing everything yourself like that. That is the reality for a lot of us in vocational ministry, but it doesn't have to be for the long haul. There's always seasons that are tough. You know, like you just get enough volunteers and now your church is adding a campus or a service or, you know, something like that. Whereas somebody, a wave of people step down. So that always happens, but you can have like a healthy, sustainable team. And so that was my goal in writing the book. And I had no, it's self-published, there's no editor. So there's no editor to say, hey, these chapters are too boring or we don't need these. So it's all in there. I tried to make, actually somebody asked me recently, how much do you talk about retention in there? I was like, you know what? That's actually a topic that I don't hit a ton. Like in my mind, if you implement all the stuff in the book, you will retain volunteers more, but there's other good books on that. So I thought like, let me write this about building a healthy volunteer culture.

yeah see i think that's really important because i think we spent so much time on the recruiting aspect of it and we in but then we also miss opportunities to talk about um uh how we can retain them you know and how we can how we can i like how you said the culture you create a great culture in there you won't have to worry about retaining them because they're naturally just going to want to stay so what do you say though to someone who will say tom if you would just announce my volunteer need on stage i will have tons of volunteers because that's what i always get like just announce it on stage and i'm gonna have a a thousand people sign up immediately

Yeah, I mean, what I would say is like, one, if you were sitting in there, are you sitting there thinking, I want to give more of my time away? I can't hope somebody asks me today, you know, from a stage, or if you went to your, I don't know, kids sports game, like, are you sitting in the crowd thinking, I hope they ask for volunteers right now while I'm out here? Like, you're probably not. And the other thing is, most of us who've done that, we've all probably had that experience where you announce it from stage. And that's not bad. In fact, that's, I mean, that's a thing I think is a good strategy. But only once you've put in a better foundation for recruiting. But the harsh reality of recruiting from stage is a lot of people say yes, they don't follow through. So you might know for every 10 people who say yes and check a box or raise their hand, you might only get like three of them or four. which you're thinking that's three or four I didn't have last week. So that'd be fine. But there is a better way. There's a few better ways. And I think if you use some of the better ways where you can kind of recruit all the time and use a system, then when you do ask from stage, you now have a better system to actually follow up with them and get them onboarded. and all that and and so that's when i think it can work and because one of the best times to recruit from stage is when clear need meets clear uh vision and so you probably i mean people probably heard people say before don't recruit from stage because it sounds desperate And that's true. It would sound desperate if that's how you worded it. Like, hey, we need help with our digital team. It's just awful. Have you seen our Instagram? It's terrible. Is anybody good at that? Because it's just crazy. That would sound desperate. But if you talked about the opportunity and then painted a picture of it, like, hey, our church is... reaching a thousand people in our region or more than a thousand let's say we have an average of thousand attendance um and we're reaching thousands of people in this area but did you know that there are you know 1.2 million people that live within 20 minutes of new life And we're starting to connect with them more online, which is just great. Our YouTube channel, you know, you and I were talking about your YouTube channel. It's your church. And you just paint a picture of like how you could reach them. Did you know that more and more people are actually checking the church out online before they come? They're reading reviews like it's a restaurant. Like, I don't know if you've seen that, Tom, but that's been a thing at our church. People will say, like, I read reviews, you know, like it's Yelp.com or whatever. And so like if you painted that vision. with the need, and you were very specific, like we're looking for this, you know, and then for other leaders, if it's children's ministry or student ministry or whatever, maybe you're painting that picture with vision and that need. Like I know our best times recruiting from the stage have been when we launched a service because it's very clear that there's a need. Anybody, you don't even have to understand how anything works in church. And you can understand that if you're adding a service, you need more people. Right. And because the most people walk around our church and you think everything looks fine, like children's ministry must be fine. You know, because it seems like it runs well. Youth ministry, I don't even see it's on Sunday nights. It's probably fine. I drop my kid off. You know what I mean? Yeah. Guest services, whatever. I don't play an instrument, so I can't be in the band. So people, most attenders will look around and think. looks like everything's good um and so when you can paint that clear need but with a clear vision i i think it's good i just think i view a stage announcement thing is kind of like um a once a year type of play you know maybe twice at the most once or twice a year and do it strategically you can get more out of it but you still need another way to recruit to get the bulk of your volunteers

Yeah, I think that's important. You hit on something earlier, just a minute ago, where you're talking about your overall strategy of recruiting, constantly recruiting. I think sometimes we rely too much on one, a stage announcement, but then two, serving Sunday or something like that, where it happens once a year. But you're talking about constantly recruiting. What does that look like for you? What do you mean there?

Yeah, and then that's probably the, I mean, probably the core of the book. Like if all you did was read the two or three chapters about that, you'd probably get the most value out of it. And the book, it goes into more detail, but essentially the method that I teach in the book, it's also what we teach at Ministry Boost and some of our courses, is to use a five-part framework. And you could make up your own framework, but the idea, there are two... probably the two big ideas behind it is you need to spend time every week intentionally. You know, most church leaders, if you ask them how often, how much time they spend recruiting volunteers every week, they'll tell you zero or one hour a week, something like that. I know, because I ask this question a lot, you know, in different settings. And So if you're only spending zero hours, obviously you're not going to have any impact if you're spending one hour. I mean, that's better than most church leaders. But so you need to spend time intentionally, especially on the front end if you're just starting this. And then the other thing is you do need some type of strategy. And part of that is so that you can walk people through something step by step. Like it's so hard for people. I imagine like, again, think take student ministry as the example. You're recruiting and you're talking to somebody in the lobby and it's like, hey, Tom. How you doing? Hey, I was wondering if, and like you're not serving, you've been coming to the church for a couple of years. Tom, I was wondering if you'd like to serve in student ministry. It's two and a half hours a week for about 35 weeks a year. And then we do two trips. So you're going to take off vacation. There's about a week long. We'd love for you to show up at some student games, you know, and plays and musicals, you know, it's probably another. 40 hours a year, you know, something like that. Tom, what do you think?

Like a lot of people aren't saying yes to that, right? Right.

But if you can get them to say yes to a smaller step and then yes to another smaller step, and then you get them thinking about it and now you can paint a picture of the vision. I mean, at some point you do have to present reality. Like here's the expectation. It is a big commitment. And I use student ministry because it's typically one of the most committed volunteer roles in the church. a lot easier obviously to get somebody to say yes to like a once a month role serving on a team during one service or something like that but you need some kind of steps that you can invite them to um that are easier you know in the marketing world they call this the yes ladder uh like when somebody's trying to sell you something now you may have experienced this but without realizing you've experienced it but they want you to say yes to clicking on that before they you say yes to watching this free thing before you say yes to selling this And that's not, I mean, it could be used for evil, you know what I mean? But that's not the goal. The goal is we're all just wired to. avoid what's confusing or certainly, and I think since pandemic even more, we're wired to avoid more commitment, quite honestly. I think we got a taste of a different life during pandemic where we weren't as busy and things like that. And I think people even now still have that in them. And so the framework just teaches, how do you reach out to a huge group of people more than you probably think and to recruit the volunteers you need, invite them to a conversation. From there, invite them to a volunteer orientation. And I don't mean orientation like you've already said yes, and let me show you what it's like. More like a sneak peek or like a preview or like an info meeting. And at there, you cast a vision and you really sell it. Like, here's what we're doing. Here's why we're doing it. This matters. I mean, you're not saying it this way, but the way I talk about it is you're basically trying to get somebody to see volunteering at church as one of their top five priorities in their life. And that's OK, because serving is a part of discipleship and our faith. And so, yeah, it shouldn't be number one, probably not number two, but it's up there. It's four or five, three, four or five. So it should be like I think of my own life. And this sounds weird, but it's like, should serving at church be more important than, I don't know, the lawn that I want at my house or like my kids' soccer club or, you know, whatever? I need to show up in all those things. But if I'm not serving, man, that's a whole piece of my faith that's not there. So I think we can be bold about it and invite people to take that step. But it's hard to do that right away, first conversation in the lobby. So you get them to say yes to this and then invite them to an orientation.

Yeah, dude, that's awesome. And as you were sharing, I was thinking of two stories I know of. One is we had a student minister or a student ministry volunteer who stopped out. He had been serving for about seven years, and he stopped about two years ago. But at the very end, when we were kind of recognizing him and honoring him, he said, you know, the youth minister before me, he said, he just asked me to come to a – youth group night and just help with that youth group night and then that turned into something else which turned into something else which again to talk to you what you talked about with that yes ladder and they they committed to something small and then they said yes to more and more things and he served for over seven years it was fantastic he was a great uh volunteer but i also was thinking about um a chat host because with the online ministry you had the chat host on sunday mornings and um what i always do with the chat host is i'm on there all the time as the online minister and um i see different people chatting throughout the different services and as they're chatting i am paying attention to them and i'm thinking okay this one seems really solid this one seems like they have a strong faith this one seems like they are really engaged in this and like to do this i'm going to reach out to them and i would reach out to them and say hey you're It's awesome having you in the chat room. Have you ever thought about being one of our chat hosts? And we kind of talk about what that looks like. And I cast a vision. I share about the opportunity that we have. And again, it falls in line with your stuff about always be looking out and always be examining what's around you and for the opportunities of people serving.

Yeah. And I mean, the best way to recruit is a little bit like that where like you, there's some kind of connection, even if you don't know them, but they've been showing up consistently as a chat host and there's an investment there already. Right. That like makes a lot of sense. That's why it's easier to recruit a parent to serve in student ministry if you've seen them drop off their kids for three years in a row. I mean, like they're just used to coming out and picking up. now they may not want to serve and get actually be there and give the time but again they're more likely probably than that person you don't even know that you've even talked to in the lobby or whatever that looks like but the and so that is really good and you only but you only get so many of those people you know to recruit from those people you know so that's why in the book one of the things we talk about is how do you build a prospect list that is a lot larger than the number of volunteers you need. And then and full of people that you don't even know so that you can start a conversation with them. It won't be as easy to get them to say yes, as it would be like that person that was already the chat host. But but you still if you reach out to enough of them, you know, get enough knows you'll get a yes. But that's the other thing people are afraid of. You don't want to be rejected. That's why we don't ask a lot of people. But the good thing is, like the framework we teach in the book, A lot of the rejections, so to speak, are just people not replying to emails or texts. And that doesn't feel quite as bad as, no, Tom, no, I'm not going to serve as a chat host. Yeah, no.

Well, and again, you never fully know unless you make the ask. who knows, maybe know that in your mind will be a yes in someone else's mind. So you never know. Okay. I want to talk about this though, because I think it's really important because once you get them in the door, once you get them in, you also talk about training and empowering them because I think this is really important because it goes along with the retention down the road. If you're not training them regularly, if you're not empowering them, they are going to leave because they feel like, oh, I'm just a warm body. I'm not needed here. Talk to me a little bit about that in your book and what you talk about with training and empowering and why it's so important.

Yeah, I remember reading the book Drive years ago from Daniel Pink. It was Drive, the subtitle was The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, I think. It was based on a study of people at their job and what motivates them. And you would think the answers would be like money, salary, career advancement, achievement. And those were absolutely factors. But what they learned from the study was... those were factors to a point where like you, they just needed salary within at a certain level. You know what I mean? They just wanted some career advancement opportunities. It wasn't like, and sure there's certain people where that's what it's all about for them, you know, but the majority of the audience there, there, there were three things that drove them autonomy. Like I can operate without being micromanaged and have some independence mastery. I want to get really good at what I do and purpose. I want to know that what I'm doing matters and makes a difference. And so in the church world, we already have the purpose. We've got the best purpose in the world, most important purpose in the world. We need to be careful to always share that. But then there's that mastery one. So I think training and empowering, that's really one and two, right? Empowering, so I have autonomy. And then training, so I have some mastery. So that's innate desires in all of us. And I think that's true even in church volunteer roles. And even going back to empowering, if you can give people leadership responsibilities and that's something that they love, then they're going to want to do that even more. That's going to make them want to stick longer term because they have a bigger investment in it now. Not everybody wants to be a leader. So some people are like, I don't care. But some people, that is something they want to do. It's kind of like that career advancement idea. Some people just want to advance just to advance, feel like they're doing better at their job and make more money. Some people, though, it is about leadership. You know, and so they want to be they want to have a voice and be a leader in the organization.

Yeah, no, I agree. I've seen a number of volunteers at times leave, and some of them have said, because I don't feel needed. I don't feel like I'm really serving here. I'm just here to do this. And they don't get the vision. And that's my fault, you know, because I'm not investing in them. I'm not encouraging them. I'm not challenging them to take steps in their volunteer leadership.

Yeah, absolutely. And so a lot of times to give people volunteer leadership opportunities, sometimes it's obvious because you might have so many volunteers that you really need to create a structure where some volunteers lead other volunteers. Sometimes it's not obvious, but you should create it just for the sole reason of giving somebody. You may not need a team. Think about host, online chat host. You know, somebody could be leading like six of those and you can lead them all by yourself. There's six of them. No big deal. But why not give one of them the responsibility of leading all the others and start to build that right? And now they're the ones leading them and communicate your communicate with the one and they're communicating with the other five. And you've started to create a structure even early on, you know what I mean, where you can lead through them. And then and usually what that means is, though, one, usually it gets better because they can actually focus more time on that specific thing.

then you can and then two it frees up some time to you know pour into other areas yeah 100 all right well dude i want people to buy this book and we're going to talk about that where they can buy it in in a second but just wrapping up this what would you encourage the person right now listening to the podcast and they're they're really frustrated and um they they're just trying to figure out where do i get started how would you encourage them today

Yeah, I would say you got to start recruiting by spending time each week. And that's what's hard. Like if you're frustrating, if you're underwater, if you're plugging holes, you know, you're certainly not thinking, how do I spend four more hours in a week? Right. Like that's, and that's the thing that I never want to, I never want to be, uh, I don't know, boy about like what's actually required to recruit, like on a shoot straight to build, especially some of the things that you would need to build probably to help. recruit volunteers. I mentioned an orientation. These are things that you might have to create that might not exist, or maybe you need to recreate them. And that takes time. So my encouragement would be know that you got to spend some more time here over the next month or two recruiting, building this up, use some kind of a framework, you know, get my book and use those five steps. Get one of our, you know, our course volunteer boost with ministry boost is essentially this it's for how to recruit is a 28 day challenge. to recruit but I'm not the only one there's other books that talk about recruiting like use some type of system foreign And the main concept of what I teach in the book is you're reaching out to a bunch of prospects who could serve, inviting them to a conversation, inviting them to an orientation. And then that's essentially how you're going to try to get them to serve. Run that play. It'll take you more time over the next month or two, but then it'll save you time down the road because you'll recruit some volunteers. They'll free up some time in your schedule. And the other encouragement I would say is, and we don't do this enough, is make sure you... if you can stop or pause some of the things you're currently doing to make time, even if it's just temporarily for a month or two, like, and it's hard, you know, I know most of the things like stop what, like I have to do everything I'm doing. Why would I do it? But the reality is you really don't, you know, if you, and there's some serious things you could stop for. I mean, I would, I'm not saying you would do this, but like, for example, what if like in your, you know, with your online, with online services and chat, what if you didn't have chat hosts for a month? That wouldn't be great. I'm not saying that's an extreme example. It's probably not what you're going to go to, but it's an extreme example of what you could stop or pause just to free up some time. Now, the easier example usually is, can I get out of certain meetings for a month? Something like that, just not forever. But, you know, can I get a certain meetings for a month? Are there some additional things we're doing? Like your church is doing online devotionals, right? And that's awesome. It'd be easy, though, if that, I mean, it's probably not taking up that much time. You got a team doing it. But if that was all you and you were spending two hours a week on it, that would be an easy yes to say, hey, we're going to pause these. for a month we still want you and you know doing devotionals investing time with God the Bible app is an excellent place for that here's what I recommend join here read it along with everybody else for the next two months and then you save two hours a week for two months and then you do this and come back turn it back on get back to doing devotionals again so if you can do that put that time in You know, you're going to have it's not like it's like this guarantee, you know, that you're going to recruit volunteers. But, man, I've seen it work in so many different settings. But it's about putting the time in and having a good framework.

yeah i well i agree as you were talking it's just all about intentionality i mean you're not going to stumble upon well you may get the random volunteer that comes around and you stumble upon that person but the reality is if you want more volunteers you have to make time for more volunteers and i like what you're talking about creating that framework saying no to some things because every time you say yes to something you're saying no to something else but also when you say no to something you could be freeing up more of that time as well so it's good to say no sometimes and so if if you want to get out of meetings talk to your boss about that but yeah but there are things that you could probably do to free up some time um nick where would people buy this book or where would they get it

Uh, volunteerplaybook.com is the best place to go. It just redirects to a page on my blog. And the reason that probably the best place is it just links to Amazon, which, you know, you can go there. There's the print Kindle and audible. It's on audible. Um, the, if you like to listen to books though, you, if you get the print or the Kindle copy, you can get an audio version for free. It's just in the form of a private podcast kind of thing. You just subscribe to. Um, so if people like that, some people I know, like they're like me and they use audible. And so they just like to quickly just use a credit, you know, which is fine, but you can't get it free. And it's kind of like a two for one if you get one of the other versions. But the other reason I say go to volunteerplaybook.com is there's free resources with every chapter. And if you, if they're even without buying the book, actually you can, you know, get access to those and different documents and files and PDFs and things that I, that we use to do what I talk about in the book.

are you the voice of the book that is read or is somebody else the voice?

I am the voice of it. And Tom, it was a challenge. Oh my gosh. Like, you know, you and I've done podcasts for a long time. We've got gear, you're right. You got mics and software used to whatever the recording specifications for audible are so tight. So crazy. Like you gotta be this quiet, but not too quiet, this loud, but not too loud. You know, this, you know, like all those things. And, um, Yeah, it was hard. Actually, the biggest challenge was I needed it to be louder to meet their minimum floor, which is pretty loud, actually, you know, like which I get because then you can scale it down and, you know, have this clear. It also couldn't be too quiet. So it was interesting, man. It took way longer than I thought just to get that right. And then I crammed to record it in the end, but it's me. It's me recording it. I thought, you know, I'm doing a podcast. You know, might as well record my own audio book. Here's the other like behind the scenes thing. I did not get the final round of edits done or not edits proofreading done after I finished. So this was around three now. for various reasons because i was behind and i feel like i could go back to my editor eight months later and get that final round and so my head i thought the if i read it i'll catch all the remaining errors and then that was sort of true i still missed a few even after that but i caught like 35 and that was after three rounds of edits wow a bunch of rounds of formatting

uh just shows you and if you even if you get it now i guarantee you'll find some mistakes in there it's hilarious how many how hard that is and how easy it is to make those the the thought of reading my own book or manuscript of some sort it just intimidates me so much i i would be so terrible at it i would 100 would be so terrible it's um it's not

Well, I don't want to say it's not fun. It is not, in some ways it's not fun. The way I looked at it though, is like, I'm teaching it. So that's where it was fun. Like, I felt like I was doing one of my courses, you know, it's like, I'm reading it, you know, and, and, and I'm probably not the most dynamic person anyway, but you know, I'm trying to view it that way. So that as the listener listens, you know, it is as if I was just teaching this content in a breakout or, or something like that. But man, it was a lot. You realize it's a, it's a lot of hours to do that and go back. And somebody told me, um, uh a friend of mine that listened to it was like there's a place where you repeated a few lines and that's probably because i didn't delete enough back when i had to re you know what i mean so it was interesting doing all that but uh it was it was fun too and now that i've learned some of the tricks and got the right gear it's like it would be it would be a lot smoother next time

Nice. Well, that's cool. Well, that's good. Well, hopefully you'll be working on the next book sooner rather than later. Tell me real quick before I get you off. Talk to me about Ministry Boost. What's that all about? How can that help people?

Yeah, we started Ministry Boost about five years ago. It's basically online courses, resource bundles, and coaching for church leaders, primarily kids and student pastors. We have other things like have the new digital church course, you know, so like your audience that does church online created that during the pandemic implemented basically everything I've learned about online marketing and online business, which we use to grow ministry boost and reach church leaders because we knew back then even 10 years ago is like we're gonna have to reach them online if we're going to reach them. So that's mostly what Ministry Boost is. Half of our content is probably about volunteers, recruiting, leading, training, all those things. The other half is probably specific to certain ministry areas, like building a text ministry, texting strategy, kids ministry, large group, new to youth ministry, those kinds of things. And so we do all that with Ministry Boost. What's interesting is in the book, there's probably six or seven courses represented in the book where like that chapter is a course that chapter is a course those three chapters are another course um and even the volunteer playbook was a course it was supposed to be a book when i started writing 10 years ago made a course about i guess it'd be six years ago now yeah and that was easier than writing a book quite honestly and so that existed for six years and kind of retired that now that the book is out but that's what we do we do coaching that always launches in january Kids, student, next gen, pastor coaching. And yeah, it's been a lot of fun working with churches. One of the things we're doing now a lot more is showing up at churches and leading their whole staff to do what we just talked about in this episode, how to recruit. And so, you know, I'm working with a few churches where we come in, teach the framework to everybody that's going to be recruiting volunteers. And then we do coaching for six months to help them set up all the systems and processes to make sure that they actually do it. And, you know, we're working with a large church out west that has, I think, 750 volunteers in NextGen across all their campuses because it's a large church with a lot of campuses. And but they need 300 more. So they need to go from 750 to like 1050 or something like that. And so we're trying to help. So I did the math while we were there. It's like, OK, we're trying to help you grow your volunteer team by 43 percent. Let's go. Let's get to work.

We can do it.

dang well if anybody's thinking man we got to grow our volunteer base at least it's on 300 people plus that's where the scale matters like you know so if you were church you had 70 and you need a 100 to be the same idea you know you get 70 volunteers you need to get to 105 or whatever you'd be in the same boat as their church but yeah it is funny because it's it's a large the original like location i think is 7 000 in attendance just by itself And then, you know, all the other campuses, but what's great for them, which all of us don't benefit from, but they're so large that some of the things they can work on. It's not like it's a lot of church leaders where one person has to do all of it. Like they can actually have teams. So they've got teams of like, they're working on the documents and they're working on the framework and they're working on the orientation. So it's pretty fun. And we're going to do the same thing with another church here soon. I've done. done this with some other churches before and so that's been a lot of fun because there's it's such a weight for all of us volunteer recruiting and we kind of love being there doing it with them to make sure they because that's the other thing is some people you can get the book and never actually do it like you can read the whole thing yeah if you don't do it you know you're not going to get any results so we love working with churches it just increases the chance to actually implement the stuff that's awesome and what's your website is it ministryboost.com it's ministryboost.org Never got, never got the, never got the.com. It used to be funny, fun fact. And we knew, I knew the guy whose brother-in-law I think did this. It used to be like one of those online church media sites, I guess, where you like buy church media, like back worship backgrounds or whatever. And once it died, it's one of those things where you can't buy it anymore, or you can, but for a stupid amount of money. So ministryboost.org, volunteerplaybook.com, best places to go.

Great. Well, I'm going to encourage everyone to check it out. Nick's a great guy. He's got lots of experience, obviously. So check out his book, check out Ministry Boost, and go from there. Well, Nick, thank you so much for being with me today. Thanks, Tom. Thanks for having me. All right, so what do you think? What stood out to you? As I told Nick earlier, you know, the important thing for me is not just the recruiting thing, but it really is the training and empowering them. Because if you can train them effectively, if you can empower them effectively, you're going to do and have a great impact with your volunteer team. So what does it look like for you? What did you learn? What stood out to you? Definitely put in the comment section below or you can email me anytime at tom at thechurch.digital. I would love to talk to you a little bit more about this today. You can also hit me up on Twitter at TAPounders. My Twitter handle, I would love to talk to you and see again what that looks like for you today. All right, heroes. Well, thanks so much for joining me today. As always, if you enjoyed the podcast, subscribe to it. It's on YouTube. It's on Apple. It's on Google. It's on all the platforms. Go to your favorite one, subscribe to it so you can get these every time they come out. I would love for you to be able to do that. All right. Well, I hope you have a great rest of your day, a great rest of your week. Until next time, have a great one.