8 Volunteer Resources to Put in Your Control Room

Put yourself in the shoes of your volunteers. 

Would you rather be over informed with details about the team your serving on or not informed at all? One thing I discovered when leading teams is the more people know, the more ownership they feel.

1. Spiritual Growth Resource

• Try listing out some recommended places your volunteers can go for daily devotionals, books, Bible Studies, Bibles, and other reading material.
• List out some Bible Studies, classes, mission trips, seminars and major spiritual growth efforts offered by your church. You’d be surprised what you might think people are aware of that they aren’t.
• List out other major activities of your church. Got a Men’s Conference coming up? Youth Camp this Summer? Your church might already have printed material you can steal, I mean, re-purpose to have available for your volunteers.

Suggested Tweet: "Take care of your team. Keep them informed - they will feel more confident and accomplish more. @carlbarnhill"

2. Team Lists and Schedules

• EPISODE 33: The Best Way to Structure Your Volunteer Team
• How to Provide an Easy to Understand Rotation Schedule for Your Volunteers

3. Staff and Core Team Contact Information

If people know who to contact if they have a question, it helps them feel informed. Make a quick list of your staff team and your core leaders. Have contact information on these leaders readily available to your volunteers. Doesn’t have to be your cell number if that makes people nervous – just make sure there is some way to get in touch with your core staff and leaders.

Suggested Tweet: "Check out these 8 resources to better equip and empower your volunteers for ministry @carlbarnhill "

4. Position Training Guides and Checklists

For some free Training Guides and Checklists on ProPresenter, Switcher, and Camera Operators, check out these posts:

• ProPresenter
• Switcher Operator
• Camera Operators

5. New Volunteer Process

For more on what I mean by our “On-Ramp” Process, check out this podcast episode:

• EPISODE 31: How to Provide a Clear On-Ramp for New Volunteers

Suggested Tweet: "The spiritual growth of volunteers should be of utmost importance in our culture. @carlbarnhill"

5. Training Process and Information

We had a pretty extensive training process for our volunteers, so I made sure to list it out in detail so that everyone knew of it and could read up on it if they wanted to.

For more on our Training Process check out this podcast episode and blog post:

• EPISODE 76: How to Provide a Consistent Training Opportunities for Your Production Team
• How to Provide a Consistent Training Opportunities for Your Production Team

6. Encouragement Cards

This is one of my favorite ideas we’ve had. We put a stack of blank notecards and envelopes in and around our control room. We also put a full list of volunteers nearby. We asked our volunteers that we they had a free minute while they were serving, that they write an note of encouragement to another volunteer or new member to our team. We asked them to write a note, write the recipients name on the envelope and our staff team addressed and mailed them during the week. It was wonderful to see our team members encouraging each other.

8. Church and Team Vision Statements

This should be real easy. Just put your mission or vision statements or some explanation of ‘why’ your team does what they do in your control room or booth. Always keep your ‘why’ in front of your team.

You may be thinking, where do I put all this stuff? How do I organize these documents so they aren’t a mess in my control room?

Consider this paper shelf organizer here to house all these resources.

I used something similar to this organizer and placed labels on the sides to indicate which tray had certain information in it.

I found great success in giving as much information to our volunteers as possible. Take care of your team. If they know what’s going on, they will feel more confident and will actually help you as their leader accomplish more.