Wouldn’t it be awesome if every church had the budget to hire an all-professional tech staff? Yes — it would be awesome! But a pretty small minority of churches have the economic capacity to do so. The result is that the vast majority of churches are staffed at least partially with volunteers. In fact, I’d guess that the majority of church tech team members are volunteers, so it ought to be pretty clear that having a well thought-out game plan for recruiting, training and retaining volunteers is not just a good idea, but an outright necessity. Let’s delve into some ideas on how to make that happen.
Make a “Wish List”
At the beginning of the process, we’ll need to establish how many audio volunteers we’ll need. How many positions will need to be filled? The one kind of big obvious position is our front-of-house mixer. We might also have a monitor mixer. And there’s a pretty decent chance we’ll have a livestream mixer too. Beyond that, we might have FOH and monitor mixers for secondary services (kids’ ministry, for instance). And maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll also have some setup assistants. Now it may be the case that the church doesn’t have enough volunteers available to staff this multitude of positions, and the result is that most (or even all) of this stuff must be handled by one very busy volunteer. That can be a pretty serious problem. Even an experienced volunteer can be overwhelmed if we expect them to mix FOH, monitors, livestream and also advance slides in ProPresenter. We might laugh and conclude that this sort of thing never happens. But it does. And overwhelmed volunteers probably won’t stick around long. We must limit what we ask of people to that which is tolerable, and we must have enough people to get the job done in consideration of this notion.
Once we determine how many people will be necessary to make good sound happen, we then need to multiply that number by two. Or even three or four. Not only is handling three mixes and ProPresenter asking too much, but expecting one volunteer to handle every single service is also asking too much. We need a little bench depth. It helps to rotate mixers around to different tasks by way of giving them different scenery every week… but it’s still every week. And people take vacations or get sick, so again, bench depth is a must. I’d recommend having two individuals for each position — three might be luxurious, but it will contribute strongly to retention. I do believe it’s possible to have too many — if an inexperienced mixer only gets board time every fourth or fifth week, there will be a negative impact on their development due to a lack of consistent, repeated experience. The kind of situational motor memory that develops from simply doing lots of mixing can be forgotten if too much time slips by.
Recruitment: Promises, Promises
During the recruiting process, it’s important to offer a lot of grace and create an inviting environment. We will not expect a completely inexperienced volunteer to handle complex, difficult tasks — make sure potential volunteers understand that we will put them in positions that correlate with their experience level. And make sure they know we will train them. In fact, gaining some pro audio training for free can be a great incentive for people who are hungry to learn. We have to get the word out that we’re seeking volunteers — we can do so during weekly announcements and/or we can use social media or email, but the bottom line is we need to make sure potential volunteers are aware that we need them.
In my mind, a cyclical recruitment process makes some sense — every three months or every six months or whatever works best. That way, a repeatable onboarding process can also be established on a cyclical basis: for instance, we recruit in February and formally onboard our new volunteers in March. Churches will have some broad requirements for all volunteers, and this can all be handled at the beginning of onboarding. Moving forward, volunteers can break out into their respective departments and start the onboarding steps specific to each of these domains. Mind you, events may cause us to require volunteers before our next cycle, so we need to be prepared to seek recruits on an ad hoc basis.
Assessing Skill Levels
Once our volunteers are onboarded, we need to assess skill levels. I like the idea of establishing quizzes that can be taken online. They can be used for two purposes: to fast-track highly experienced volunteers, and to discover gaps in the understanding of less experienced volunteers. By way of training, there are some excellent online resources — in particular lots of great YouTube videos that teach proper audio. But simply instructing our volunteers to watch videos would be insufficient. We have to teach them via traditional means — we need to hold classes and have them attend and go through a formally-developed curriculum.
We need to set up a simple P.A. system so we can demonstrate fundamental concepts like “amps on last and off first”, for example, and we need to let the new volunteers point mics into speakers and learn about feedback, among many other concepts. Let them push buttons and turn knobs and get a feel for how sound works. We can show them videos and explain EQ, but they have to play with it to truly understand it. The curriculum should be broken into sequential, building-block modules, in my opinion. This facilitates an organized, systematic way for them to learn bite-sized chunks and build up knowledge, while also creating a way to objectively assess how much they’re learning. It makes sense to me to allow mixing volunteers to start shadowing once they’ve reached an appropriate level of understanding, and then once they’ve spent sufficient time observing and asking questions, they should be put in front of the controls with supervision. If your church requires sound reinforcement for kids’ ministry, this can be a good training ground for volunteers who hope to get to the big leagues and mix in the main sanctuary on Sunday morning.
A volunteer staff is less costly than a paid staff, but it still has a cost, and as with hiring in the real world, it’s always easier to retain trained, happy workers than to recruit and train new ones, so we need to think about retention. One very important key here is to very clearly define job roles and expectations. People perform a lot better when we carefully spell out expectations and communicate them clearly. As we said before, we need to maintain enough bench depth to avoid volunteer burnout. Similarly, we need to honor the fact that our volunteers have a life outside church, and while we are asking them for a certain level of commitment, we can’t expect them to drop everything and make volunteering the center of their lives. Advance scheduling is important to this notion. Planning Center Online is a great way to ask your volunteers to block out dates on which they’ll be unavailable, and that alone shows them that we are sensitive to their busy lives.
A Pat on the Back Helps
Volunteers are motivated to serve the Lord, but they also like to be shown appreciation. And some volunteers will seek to be promoted — give them opportunities to do so. Granting additional responsibility commensurate with experience and skill levels can be a potent enticement for volunteers to strive to learn and improve (and stick around). Frequent and clear communication is important, although we shouldn’t bury our volunteers with a blizzard of daily emails. Creating a culture of team fellowship is a great idea as well. Have a Worship Tech Team Bowling Night or a nice backyard barbecue. People who have good fellowship will have each other’s back — they’re more likely to fill in for an ailing teammate on short notice. It’s just nice when the tech team can have their own culture and do life together.
Recruiting, training and retaining a great team of volunteers doesn’t have to be rocket science. It does require some planning and development of a system, but once the system is in place, the results can be great.
John McJunkin is the chief engineer and staff producer in the studio at Grand Canyon University.
