Streamline Volunteer Onboarding: Optimize with Planning Center People Forms & Workflows

I don’t know about you, but I have been a part of churches where people have fallen through the cracks. I have fallen through the cracks. Nothing is worse than wanting to serve on a team at your church and not hearing back regarding the next steps. Today, you will learn the perfect framework for onboarding volunteers to your church. Whether you have a process for recruiting your volunteer teams or not, I will share some handy tools in Planning Center People that you can use to standardize this process, making it easy and efficient. After implementing these tips and tricks, you will be equipped to engage each congregant more intentionally, ensuring that no one falls through the cracks. So let’s get started.

Crafting your onboarding process

One of my favorite techniques for ensuring the success of a project or initiative is to start with the end in mind. Once you know the desired outcome, you can reverse engineer the steps you need to take to get the desired result. Please take a second and think about your desired outcome in building out this process. Do you want this process to be fast or slow? Are you looking to vet people or equip people? Do you want people to have the church's culture instilled in them before they serve? Etc. Once you know the desired outcome, you can build the perfect process.

Walking in your gifting(s) produces fruit

Now that we have an idea of the desired outcome, we can dive head first into building out the perfect process, right? Not quite! Before discussing the tools available to streamline your volunteer onboarding process, let’s examine the heart behind your process. Although this is not the primary focus of this article, there is much to say about providing your congregation with an opportunity to discover their God-given gifts and talents, develop them, and then apply them in serving the church. When people are allowed to serve and walk in their gifts, it produces fruit, and the church and the body are direct beneficiaries. If someone is consistently serving outside of their gifts and strengths, over time, this can lead to volunteer burnout. This is often the result of not being intentional with whom we schedule to fill an urgent volunteer need. I highly suggest developing a “Strength finder” or “Spiritual Gifts Test” approach to your membership classes and incorporating individual strength discovery into the preliminary steps to serving in your church.

Step-by-step creating your volunteer onboarding process

Forms: Intake and Gathering Volunteer Interest

Now, let’s talk about the tools available in Planning Center from a high level. The first tool we will discuss is a People form. Forms are a great way to offer potential volunteers a way to express interest in serving. First off, forms provide fields that you can use to gather information about potential volunteers, such as selecting a ministry area of interest.

As a note: rather than listing all possible serve roles, it may be more efficient and practical to list the Ministry Departments or areas. In a later step, when speaking with the potential volunteer, you can discuss the specific roles available in more detail.

The best way to list all available ministry areas in the form is found under “Workflow Fields.”  You can use checkboxes or a drop-down field to list your areas and then tie those directly to a Workflow in People. When a congregant selects their area of interest, their profile card will be sent directly into this Workflow, notifying staff or volunteers to follow up and walk them through a series of steps. (More on setting up that Workflow below.) Remember to ask questions on your form using fields that gather your requirements to serve. Here are a few examples we have used as required fields: membership class completion, signed membership agreement, personal story or testimony, etc. These fields become the foundation for additional follow-up and ensure that all necessary steps are taken before a person begins to serve. In addition to workflow fields, you can also implement automation on your form. Automations allow actions to happen when someone fills out the form.

Workflow tip: One particular automation that would benefit this form would be the People action of sending to a workflow. If this automation is used, anyone filling out the form will be sent to a designated onboarding workflow. Automations are more “all or nothing,” whereas using the Workflow fields will allow you to automate the process, allowing the form submission to add people to multiple workflows based on the selections made.

Workflows are where the work is done

Before creating your Volunteer Interest Form or before utilizing the “Workflow Fields” on the forms mentioned above, you will need to complete this step. The “Volunteer Onboarding Workflow,” as we call it, is a series of steps that help a staff member walk a potential volunteer through onboarding into a position or role on a team. These steps range from verifying information on the potential volunteer’s profile, connecting and having a larger conversation about the area(s) of interest, ordering a background check, and placing them on a team (hopefully in Planning Center Services). Each step should have a descriptive title and a detailed description of the actions to be taken. Detailed descriptions allow others to partner with us in completing these workflows while following the same standards or procedures. Make sure to have a final workflow step that you snooze for 30 days. This is an excellent way to follow up after the person has been serving and find out how it’s been going for them. Are they enjoying the role? How many times have they participated? If, for some reason, the fit isn’t right, you can send them back to the first step and start down a new path of finding their perfect place to serve.

Building Relationships is Key

Both forms and workflows allow staff members to communicate directly with congregants. Engaging with the potential volunteer builds a relationship that strengthens their sense of belonging within the body of your church and transfers ownership of the serving opportunity to the volunteer. It’s also essential to have a structured follow-up cadence with active volunteers (30 days, 90 days, six months, etc.) to ensure they feel fulfilled and are growing relationally and spiritually.

Using the tools in Planning Center

People forms and workflows help you manage the onboarding process more efficiently. If you are assigned to manage the workflow or have the workflow card pinned to your profile, you will receive updates on your People dashboard. These notifications are a great way to ensure you remain engaged in the onboarding process. Additionally, these notifications help keep things organized and allow your leadership team to ensure no one is slipping through the cracks. We also recommend pulling a few lists based on these forms and workflows so that your leadership can also keep an eye on the process. Between creating a great process and using the fantastic tools Planning Center provides, we know your volunteer onboarding will become a well-oiled machine.

I hope you have found this article helpful. If you aren’t already using a form and workflow combination to manage your volunteer onboarding, you will soon. Check out our YouTube channel for more details about setting up workflows and forms in People. If you have any questions or need help building this out for your church, please email us at info@threefold.solutions.