Every church in every state had a radically different 2020 story.

Maybe your church shut down your campus and hosted exclusively online services and events. Maybe you tried a hybrid. Maybe your church was business as usual.

One thing every church shares, though, is that it took people to make your ministry happen. Before the end of the year, maybe make time to tell them how much you appreciate the role they played in making it through the last twelve months of ministry.

It doesn’t have to be much, just personal. The simple intentionality of saying “thank you” can go a long way in making people feel valued.

Find Your Volunteers

Between your detailed records in Services and the Lists feature in People, it shouldn’t take more than a minute or two to find everyone who served this year.

You can make your list as specific or generic as you want it to. Start by creating a list of everyone who served anywhere within a specific time frame, and then narrow it down with additional conditions as needed—by team, ministry department, and more!

You can make as many lists as you like, so don’t be afraid to play around with list conditions and options until you have exactly what you need.

Once you’ve dialed in your list (or lists), it’s time to add all of the people to a workflow so you can go through your thank-you process.

Follow-up Personally

It may be December, but don’t feel pressure to make sugar Christmas tree cookies or handmake card with reindeers on them (if you do, all the applause, you are doing the most 👏 ) but it should be personal—to both the person saying and receiving the thank you.

Workflows is the perfect way to help you get organized.

Start by creating a step for everything you want to do to say thank you, even if it’s just one step—Write Thank You Notes—then start funneling people from your lists into your workflows.

A few tips to getting your team involved:

  • Delegate to team leads: Keep it personal by asking leads to thank the volunteers they worked with personally. You can assign people workflow steps, or just leave cards so people can take the cards they want.
  • Set deadlines and reminders: Give yourself and staff a time limit to get all your thank-you’s out, and then make sure it happens by setting automatic reminders.

The most important thing is to be genuine. Lists and Workflows are a great way to stay on top of things, but they won’t help you be personal, and it is all too easy to lose sight of that.

So we hope that by having a process you can switch from task mode to connection mode as you reach out to the people who helped carry your church through the last year.

Keep doing good work,
Planning Center