Are you looking for a simple and effective check in system for your youth ministry?In this episode, we are talking about practical strategies for creating an easy and simple check-in station. We will be discussing various check-in systems from high-tech to low-tech, and emphasize the critical role of tracking attendance to maintain engagement and ensure no student slips through the cracks. Should you use name tags? Should you give out gifts for first time visitors? All of these questions will be answered here!
We love hearing from you all and we do our best to provide powerful and insightful youth ministry content on a weekly basis to be that coach and mentor you may not have, but desperately need. If you have an episode idea, please E-Mail us at MinistryCoachPodcast@gmail.com!
If you have it on your heart to support this ministry, please consider going to our Patreon page at: www.patreon.com/ministrycoach
*This episode is not sponsored. Some of the links are affiliate links which simply means, if you buy something, we will receive a small commission (at no additional cost to you) Thank you!*
Are you looking for a simple and effective check in system for your youth ministry?In this episode, we are talking about practical strategies for creating an easy and simple check-in station. We will be discussing various check-in systems from high-tech to low-tech, and emphasize the critical role of tracking attendance to maintain engagement and ensure no student slips through the cracks. Should you use name tags? Should you give out gifts for first time visitors? All of these questions will be answered here!
We love hearing from you all and we do our best to provide powerful and insightful youth ministry content on a weekly basis to be that coach and mentor you may not have, but desperately need. If you have an episode idea, please E-Mail us at MinistryCoachPodcast@gmail.com!
If you have it on your heart to support this ministry, please consider going to our Patreon page at: www.patreon.com/ministrycoach
*This episode is not sponsored. Some of the links are affiliate links which simply means, if you buy something, we will receive a small commission (at no additional cost to you) Thank you!*
Today we're talking about check-in stations for youth ministry and how to make the process simple. How do you have an effective check-in station for students? When they arrive, Should we give out name tags? Also, should we give out gifts to first time students?
Speaker 2:
Good, good question, and I feel like this one comes up a lot actually. So I'm sure there's other people wondering the exact same thing. I will start with the name tag thing. I feel like name tags are like I think they need to end at fifth grade. I think that anything above that it just to me feels a little children's ministry, which is totally fine for children's ministry, but in student ministries I just feel like they may have graduated from a name tag.
Speaker 1:
I'm always shocked when they do it for adult events, me too, and I never wear them.
Speaker 2:
I hate them.
Speaker 1:
We're doing this, okay yeah, because it does feel oh, we're hate them.
Speaker 2:
We're doing this, okay yeah, because it does feel like they get caught in my hair, and then, well, I don't have that problem but it just seems very kiddy, yeah it does, or forced, you know, and all of that. And I mean I would much rather go up to a kid and say what's your name? Yeah then like be like hi, jeff, you know. Uh, so no one name tags for me, but you know, I'm sure there's differing opinions out there on that, but you asked me, so that's my opinion on it.
Speaker 2:
But okay, check in. So check in is a couple of options here. So right now we have a computer check in station that links to our software system. The software system our church uses is called Rock and it's a people tracking software system database that our entire church uses and I'm sure there's like right before that we were using one called Arena. There's one called Shelby I'm sure there's, or maybe Shelby doesn't exist anymore. That's one that one's old, but there's tons of people tracking software. If your church has one, see if there's an option to do computerized check in. Maybe call your rep for the software and see like, hey, do we have an option to do a systemized check in system because it could be a feature on your software system that you just don't know about. So check that first If you guys even have a people tracking software for your church. Now, if you don't, it's not like all hope is lost, because if you're a smaller church maybe you guys have.
Speaker 2:
You know a very simple way of tracking people. What I used to do is, before we had the software system, before the students came in, I would put a little yellow attendance card on their chair, just a blank one, an attendance card and a mini pencil, a little golf pencil, and, like students, would come in, you know, hang out, and then when we sat down to start the service, they knew the first thing you do is fill out your attendance card and then I'd have a student leadership kid come and collect them all and then we put them in a pile, have all the kids stand up and we do some kind of fun elimination, like I'd pick a name, like if you're wearing a hat, sit down. If you're a boy, stay standing. If you're in black jeans, stay standing. It's you rowan, yay, um, and they'd get a piece of candy. That was the incentive for them to actually fill it out and not turn it into a paper airplane, or mickey mouse and donald duck and all the other names their damn names, yeah.
Speaker 2:
And so then, uh, you know, we'd collect all the pencils and stuff like that, and then what I would do is I'd take that stack of yellow attendance cards and then I would go and put it into my own Excel sheet, so it would say weekend attendance and I'd have all the dates up at the top, and then I would just start going and writing their names in and then I'd put a little X next to the date. If they were present, if there was a new student, you know, I'd add them, and then I was at least able to see wow, like that one kid Kennedy, she was really regular and then all of a sudden she stopped coming. I should, I should reach out, you know. So on the attendance card, you know, I would just put name and grade, because the software system at the time it didn't do check-in, but we still had a software system so I could look up her phone number. I didn't have to keep that in my attendance sheet.
Speaker 2:
So hopefully your church at least has a way to to file people's personal information so that, like you get a new student, you get all their information. You put them in the software system and then all you would really have to do is keep track of their name and then you just save that and then you update it the next week and the next week and the next week, and then if you see a kid and they haven't been there in a long time after you've reached out and they moved or whatever, then you just delete them.
Speaker 2:
You know, and so that worked for me for years and that's how I did it until, like, we upgraded our system to do it computerized. But it was at least a way to track and not just like, ah, okay, so then Tuesday midweek program that's a little bit different, because we go to small groups and so it would be really weird to have attendance cards on chairs during our midweek program. Maybe your midweek program would work great for that, but we're too big and it's just it would be way too chaotic. So what I do is I print out those Excel sheets for the small group leaders, so it'd be like Jeff's small group and it has your 12 boys in there, and I would print that out each week and I'd put it in your small group folder and then you would just check who was there and who was not under, or just who was there under the date, and then you'd put it back in your folder. If you had a new kid who wasn't on that yet, you would just pull out a new info card. So I have these junior high info cards that I put in the folder and it says like students names, students date of birth, address, phone number, parent email, small group leader, whatever. They put it back in the folder and then we add that kid to the database and then I'll add that kid to the Excel sheet and so it'll be updated for the leader next week with the inputted attendance. So I take it out of the folder and say, oh, this person, this person, this person, I'll update it in there, add any new kids, print out a fresh one for next week and put it back in the folder.
Speaker 2:
So those are like the two systems midweek versus weekend attendance. And even though we do have computerized check in, I don't use it on my midweek. So again, it would just kind of be chaotic. There's like new kids coming and nobody knows and like it's just way easier to have small group leaders do attendance. It's like we're all here, we've all settled, I can see who's here and now I can be responsible for going through and checking people. Just weekend, I don't know why. It's just easier to do computerized check-in, but midweek they're all over the place, like we have the whole church to ourselves, so I can't really funnel them to a computer, right? You know what I mean. So that's why.
Speaker 1:
Okay, and then a follow up is oh, the gift thing.
Speaker 2:
Kind of Okay. So if they're a first time visitor on our midweek program, that is when we have our snack shack open. So I say, any first time visitor, you can get a free item from the snack shack. And what I'll usually do is I'll pair them with one of our student leadership kids. So I'll be like hey, Mason, this is Brandon, can you take him to the snack shack and show him around and he gets his free item like okay, sweet. Sometimes I've done it to where, like the friend who brought them, maybe can have something to. If you're smaller, that could be a good incentive. And then on the weekend I actually don't, I don't give them anything, but you could give them a candy or something like that they love.
Speaker 1:
Wow, make sure you check out the episode.
Speaker 2:
Here's why Can I tell you really quick, because I I'm not a big fan of giving swag to new people Like I don't think you want.
Speaker 1:
It doesn't have to be swag though.
Speaker 2:
I know, but a lot of youth pastors would give them like a sticker or a mug or whatever it's like. Well, you might not want something with our name on it. They don't even know us yet.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, no, that makes sense. I think there's other options that you could probably do that would be useful for them, but we did a whole episode on that. So, if you want to check it out, some options to give first time students I think some of them do have the swag your ministry logo, but other other ones of them don't, so make sure you check that out.
