3. Communications Director
You didn’t need a staff member to manage the bulletin. But now? Odds are you don’t have a bulletin. Bulletins have mostly been replaced by email, social media, QR codes, YouTube, and stage announcements. All of these communication channels are necessary and important. And they must be led and coordinated.
Maximizing digital communication channels is mostly new for churches. If you want to learn how to best integrate, not add, digital experiences, consider the Remodel Your Church Model Course and Masterclass Experience.
4. Information and Data Analyst
Data is too important to overlook, especially when it’s so easy to get, process, and analyze. The best decisions are data-driven.
For example, I’m working with about a dozen churches on new generosity systems. As I write this content, I’m sitting in an airport after spending a few great days with a church on this topic. We discussed as a group how to best measure the giving progress. Here’s the list of metrics we will soon begin tracking:
- Percentage of Giving Units against their Active Database.
- Percentage of Giving Units by each category (In my Funding Funnel work, we define 5 categories of givers and work to inspire movement from one type to the next).
- Percent Change in Total Giving Growth (Quarter vs. Previous Year Quarter, Rolling 12-Months vs. Previous Rolling 12 Months).
- Percent Change in Medium Gift Size (Quarter vs. Previous Year Quarter, Rolling 12-Months vs. Previous Rolling 12 Months).
- The number of First-, Second, and Fourth-time givers per Month (This also triggers a Thank You System).
- New Recurring Givers per month (This also triggers a Thank You System).
- Recurring Giver Drop Off per month.
Knowing how much money was given last Sunday is no longer sufficient for data-driven decisions. These lag metrics are essential and should still be measured, but steps and trends measure growth.
5. Adult Engagement Director
This position is a better representation of what was previously education, discipleship, and assimilation. Engagement is about participation in community, giving, serving, baptism, and more. Even within these categories, there are multiple incremental steps.
Churches today need staff members waking up every day thinking about how to better move people into incremental engagement steps. This doesn’t happen by accident.
How Do You Pay For All These Positions?
Growing our church resolves many of our staffing issues. While we work on that, here are two other suggestions:
1. You don’t have to hire all of these positions immediately. Over time, as staff members migrate off your team, consider how you can restructure your current team members to accommodate some of these new positions.
2. Every position doesn’t have to be a paid staff position. Giving some of the above responsibilities to highly engaged volunteers is possible and, in some cases, preferable. Additionally, consider outsourcing some of your current staff positions to volunteers to make staffing room for these more specialized roles.
What we can’t do is ignore the roles necessary for success in our churches today. Whether you outsource, shift some staff around, or think differently about how volunteers are used, these responsibilities are too critical to remain absent at our church.
This article originally appeared here and is used by permission.
