The Biggest Mistake Churches Make (With Their Tech Teams)
There’s a saying in the nonprofit world, “don’t treat your volunteers like free labor.”
Many churches can learn something from that.
This saying means a few things, and they highlight how nonprofits (and churches) make mistakes in budgeting, and with volunteers. The core idea is this:
A volunteer is just a donor in a different form.
Volunteers are donating time. That’s called an “in-kind donation,” and it’s tax-deductible. Now, it isn’t particularly relevant to you whether or not your church volunteers are writing off their time on their taxes. Hopefully, though, this helps you see “this is a big deal! These are serious donations!” These donor-volunteers should be treated with as much gratitude and respect as financial donations.
So how do churches mess up in this area? How do we disrespect the Donor-Volunteer?
Don’t Make It Hard To Volunteer
The low-hanging fruit: Don’t make it hard to volunteer, any more than you would make it hard to donate! Kind of obvious, right? Make it as easy as possible to volunteer (in a way that actually helps your organization). One concrete way I see churches make it hard to volunteer is they have an A/V system that is far too hard to run. I’ve written about this elsewhere, but here are a few examples:
Churches using software to do what hardware does as well. Remember, software has a steeper learning curve than (most) hardware. It takes longer to learn OBS than it takes to learn to use a hardware streaming device. It takes longer to learn how to use a web browser to log in to a PTZ camera and move the camera using mouse buttons (yikes!) than to use an $800 joystick.
These complex (but free) solutions are intimidating to volunteer recruits! And they’re discouraging to new recruits. Now, if it was hard because it had to be hard, fair enough. Some tasks are difficult. But these examples aren’t difficult because they need to be. They’re difficult because the church is saving money with free solutions, respecting the monetary donor, but not the donor-volunteer.
Churches don’t have an easy role for new volunteers. Some aspects of the tech team are hard. There isn’t a great way around the fact that mixing audio takes some skill, and it takes time to foster that. Except in the simplest churches (regarding audio), this is not a great first role for a volunteer. But there are other places that can be easy roles. For example, depending on how it’s organized, the Video Switcher can be a relatively easy job to learn. Or it can be complex, depending on how you’ve organized your systems. The slideshow can be relatively simple to run, or it can be fairly complex.
In most churches, run by teams of volunteers, one of your primary considerations needs to be “yeah yeah yeah. But which of these options gets us most of the quality but makes things easy for volunteers to use?” Too often, decisions are made by the most competent person on a team, and they think “I could do this. I could do that. This isn’t THAT hard. Sure, that’s possible.” That’s wrong-headed. The goal isn’t “what is possible for a very competent person,” the goal is “what looks good and is possible for a fairly new recruit?” Don’t make it hard to volunteer.
Don’t be a bad steward of the donor-volunteer
Churches use volunteer time to do what hardware could do much more simply. For example, some time ago I spoke with a church that created (2) recordings of each worship service. One was the entire service, the other was only one section of the service (Moments With Children) for the Children’s Director.
When considering ways to restructure their A/V system, one person argued they could just take the recording of the entire service, load it into a video editor, cut out the Moments With Children, export that as a second video file, upload that to the internet, and email the link to the Children’s Director. Think through that process! Each step sounds simple, but it requires someone (ie a volunteer) who knows how to use video editing software….and an hour of work each week.
Now, this wouldn’t be so bad if it was crucial. But this suggestion was offered to save the church $765 for a second video recorder (A Blackmagic HyperDeck Studio HD Plus, if you are wondering). You see, this suggestion respects the monetary donors who gave $765, but it doesn’t respect the volunteer-donor who donates an hour or two each week for this convoluted process.
How many of us have heard stories of mega-churches overworking college student volunteers to labor (for free) so the church can save a few dollars? This is the same basic problem, except in the tech team.
Conclusion
Treating donor-volunteers poorly in these basic regards is not only creating burnout and anger in your volunteers, it’s making your church less functional. Look for ways to make it easier to volunteer, and find ways to save volunteers from excessive work.
