As a new ministry year begins, many of us are looking for ways to be more effective in our mission. From shopping lists for kids ministry to important meetings with church leadership, we are like jugglers with a million things in the air. I’ve come to realize that Children’s Ministry leaders are some of the most productive people in the world, but I also know we can become tired and overwhelmed with all there is to do. With that in mind, I wanted to share three resources to help you in ministry.
Church Metrics
Church Metrics is a free tool from Life Church to help with tracking the important measurables in ministry. You can use this tool to track anything, but it comes preloaded with tracking of attendance, salvations, giving and volunteers. It compiles the data and gives a really helpful dashboard to see all the data you’ve inputted.
Our ministry has found this tool valuable for tracking kids’ attendance and new families across all campuses. We can generate charts and graphs to see trends in our kids’ attendance or seasons when guest attendance is higher. These charts help us to schedule our volunteers and plan our ministry to be more prepared and more effective in reaching families and kids.
Mosaico
We all know the struggle to get volunteers and parents to read our emails. Mosaico is a free responsive email template builder. In English, this means a tool for making boring text emails more stylish with graphics, buttons and customized layouts. After you create the email template, it’s easily copied as HTML code and embedded into almost any email client or church database system.
With Mosaico, you can add your ministry logo to an important parent email. You can add screenshots of lessons or photos of crafts to a volunteer email. And most important, you can design the email to highlight the most important information that catches the reader’s eye.
Evernote
Anyone who has ever been in a meeting with me knows that I’m a huge fan of Evernote. Plain and simple, Evernote is a note-taking app, but it’s really much, much more. Evernote helps to organize notes, to-do lists, projects and more by creating separate “notebooks” and allowing you to search for keywords in any note.
For example, I remember having a discussion about photo booth ideas, but I couldn’t remember when that meeting happened, who was in that meeting, or what exactly were the ideas. I just remember that we did talk about it sometime and somewhere! So, I opened Evernote, searched for notes with “photo booth” anywhere in the note, and viola! I found the note with all the ideas, a date when the meeting was held, and who else as with me in the meeting!
Evernote has a free version, but I’m so in love that I use a paid version that allows me to create a new note just by emailing myself, sharing notebooks with others, and turning my notes directly into a super clean, easy-to-use presentation. If you work with a big team, I suggest the Business Plan that allows everyone to have an account and collaborate shared notebooks.
Bonus Resources:
These are resources that I’ve used in the past or am currently attempting to use. They are worth mentioning and may be great tools for what you need!
Task Management: Trello, Asana
Social Media: Buffer, Hootsuite, IFTTT (IF-This-Then-That)
Focus/Productivity: Cold Turkey (Guaranteed to help you focus after you get over the initial shock of being locked out of Facebook!)
This article originally appeared here.
