Volunteer Coordination through Blogs

We were recently having some discussion at church about how to handle scheduling and signup of volunteers for Sunday mornings.

I recently finished reading The Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch. It is a terrific resource for learning about using blogs for many different uses in church life, and I'm hoping to write more about it later; but one use for blogging mentioned was using a blog for sharing news of ministry teams. The book suggests using multiple (and free even, like this one) blogs for sharing information.

I came across an example of this - a blog used for scheduling Sunday morning worship. The media team for Lake Pointe Church uses several blogs to schedule media team volunteers for multiple campuses.

You can see the schedule gateway here. Choose a campus, and you'll see a blog like the one I've shown here. There is one blog entry per week. Volunteers can view the current schedule in the entry and add comments to volunteer (or change status).

Its a very simple and elegant concept, and an effective use of blogging.

I believe the same concept can be applied over at our church's forum. In fact, I'm currently using the forum to list songs for each week for the Praise Team. It would be pretty easy to extend this concept to scheduling.

The one big drawback is that it requires volunteers to actually use it; and I'm not sure our congregation may be ready for this.