While the Services feature was originally designed for Worship Ministries, it carries across to Youth Services very easily. Here’s a few tips to help your ministry get the most out of Services:
Service Plans
Service Plans are pretty self-explanatory, having a good plan helps you run the service smoothly, and accomplish everything you set out to do in that time.
Items
Items are your best friend when planning a Youth Service. If you’re not actually singing or playing a song, you should be using items. So, any activities, talks, games, small groups, and meals that your ministry runs should be allocated time in the plan as an item.
Songs
If you sing songs at your Youth Service, you can save yourself a lot of time with CCLI reports and records by adding songs into your Plans as songs (as opposed to items).
Notes
Notes can be attached to any song or item in a Service Plan. For songs, this is a great way to remind your band, during the service, of any changes you’ve made during practice. However, because your notes will mostly be read at-a-glance, make sure you keep them short and sweet.
For items like the games, you can put all of the instructions in a note, and the person running the game can read the instructions from the LIVE service. (For more about Elvanto LIVE, go to this link.)
Learn more about Service Plans at this page.
Scheduling Volunteers
There are two main ways to schedule volunteers for your youth services: Individually, or Automatically.
Individual Scheduling
Scheduling individuals is the simplest way to schedule volunteers on to services. You can go through services one at a time, or select multiple services on the ‘Services’ page to edit them together. If you choose to edit a large number of services at once, be careful to ensure that you don’t accidentally miss something while scrolling!
To see how to schedule individual volunteers onto a service, look at this link.
To see how to edit multiple services together, look at this link.
Auto-scheduling
Auto-scheduling automatically schedules on the person who hasn’t served in that position for the longest time (if they’re available). For Auto-scheduling to work at its best, you’ll need to have every volunteer’s unavailability before you assign the positions.
To see how to use Auto-scheduling, have a look at this link.
For a more in-depth look at scheduling volunteers, check out this page.
Working with Volunteers
Communicating with your volunteers is a necessary part of having volunteers. Elvanto makes it easy to keep everyone up-to-date with the latest developments.
General Communication
Elvanto offers SMS and email communication. It’s up to you to figure out which is best for your particular team – it may even be a combination of them both!
For a step-by-step guide to contacting people generally, have a look at this page.
Contacting people on a particular service
To contact volunteers for a particular service, simply go to the service that the volunteers are rostered on for, and click the ‘Contact Volunteers’ button up the top. You’ll then be given options on who you want to contact, and whether to use email or SMS.
For a walkthrough of how to contact people in a service, visit this page.
Setting up notifications and reminders
Notifying volunteers that they have been rostered on, and reminding them that they have a position to do at the upcoming service ensures that you have your whole team able to fulfill their various roles. Elvanto can automatically notify people that they’re rostered on, and automatically remind them when the date is closer – you’ve just got to set it up.
Learn how to set up these notifications at this page.
Learn how to set up these reminders at this page.
If you want to know more about notifications, reminders, and other ways to communicate schedules to your volunteers, check out this link.