Easter is just around the corner, but it’s never too late to plan—even one step towards getting organized can make a huge difference!
This post is a collection of some of our best-practices and pro tips as you prepare for what might be one of your busiest and most important Sundays of the year.
No matter what area of ministry or what stage of planning you’re in, there is something here to help make your Easter Sunday a success.
Create a unique Easter service plan
In some ways, planning for Easter is like planning for Sunday as usual. You do all your normal things—like organizing your service and scheduling volunteers—but with a little bit (maybe a lot) of extra sprinkled into the mix. It might feel overwhelming to sort out additional rehearsal times and scheduling magic, but we put all of these special service planning items in their own Services-specific doc to help you do it.
How-to: Check out the article on how to Create a Special Service for ideas on how to make your service plans go smoothly.
Find last-minute volunteers
Even on an all-hands-on-deck kind of Sunday like Easter, there are bound to be a few roles or tasks that you need a volunteer to own. Here are two ways to find those people in the next few weeks.
Fill in the gaps with Signup Sheets
If you have everyone on your volunteer teams assigned, scheduled, and confirmed, but still have a few missing roles to be filled, Signup Sheets are your new best friend.
Signup Sheets are the easiest way to put out a big “casting call” to your existing volunteer force in Services and show them the roles you need filled for the big day.
How-to: Watch the video and read the article for exact instructions on how to enable signup sheets in Services and email it to your volunteer teams.
Find brand new volunteers by creating a “pipeline”
You can also find brand new volunteers using the Forms feature in People to give people the opportunity to express interest, then funnel them into teams in Services where you can start scheduling them—a volunteer pipeline!
Depending on the roles you need to fill, it might be tricky to onboard brand new people. But if you have simple or straightforward tasks that a new person could easily take on, a pipeline could be a great way to bring in new volunteers!
How-to: Check out the video and blog tutorial on how to set up a volunteer pipeline between People and Services.
Get it on the Calendar
Holidays like Easter usually mean the whole church campus—facilities and resources—are being used at max capacity.
Calendar is a way to make sure everyone on your staff and volunteer teams are informed about exactly what is happening, when, where, and with what stuff on Easter.
By setting up a special Easter event in Calendar, you can take the fundamental step of making sure it’s on everyone’s radar, but it can also serve as a foundation for you to build on with other important scheduling, room, and resource details.
How-to: Learn how to Create a Special Service event in Calendar. From there you can request rooms and resources, set the schedule for the service, and more!
Be ready for check-in busyness
It’s hard to predict how many new or returning families could show up on Easter morning. And while it’s a good and exciting thing if you have more families checking in than you know what to do with, it’s probably better if you do know what to do with them.
With Check-Ins, it’s easy to set up a few mobile stations on volunteers’ phones or tablets so that in an “emergency” situation of a crazy long line at your usual check-in stations, visiting parents don’t have to wait more than a few minutes to get their kids into a class.
How-to: Learn how to create a new station on a phone. From there, you can learn how to print labels to another station from your mobile station. Also, take the time to create a backup plan for if technology breaks down on you.
Follow-up with visitors
Easter is one of those Sundays where you can have a lot of first-time or returning visitors. Whether they are there to honor a tradition, from a desire to find meaning, or for something else is unknown, but they are there for something.
If you take the time to intentionally lay out a path to connect with people—whether through personal interaction, a children’s check-in, or a connect card—and track it in People and Check-Ins you can have everything you need to follow-up with them in a meaningful way later.
How-to: Set up a connect card with the Forms feature in People to gather information about first-time guests and then funnel those guests into a workflow where you can follow up. And/or create a list of all the families who checked children in for the first time and add all of those people to a workflow.
Anything we didn’t cover that you have questions about? Our support team would love to help. Click the question mark in the top right-hand corner of any Planning Center product and send us an email.
Happy Easter!