Production, Volunteer Culture

3 Ways to Prepare Your Production Team for Excellence.

Before reading this post, you may want to check out this post: Excellence vs. Perfection

Here are 3 practical ways you can prepare your teams for excellence in executing your services:

1. Offer Non-Stressful Training Opportunities.

Offer training sessions at non-stress times (meaning not Sundays or Wednesdays). Give your new volunteers a chance to touch and play with the gear. Give your seasoned volunteers an environment in which to cross-train and learn a new position. This is also an opportunity to let your seasoned volunteers train new people. If you have a band rehearsal on a night of the week where your volunteers would have opportunities to train on camera and directing, that’s ideal. If not, perhaps plan in advance and have a worship leader training or private concert that would give your people a real, but non-stressful environment in which to learn.

2. Regularly Evaluate your Services.

This is so crucial, yet not a lot of production teams do this. Watch how your team did. Make a list of what you saw- be sure to include the good things that you noticed and give praise for those things. Also include items that need ‘coaching up’ or improvement.

You can do this by gathering your team and watching the service together. Or you could post it online and attach your comments to the video- a good way to accomplish this is to upload your video to Vimeo and use the description section to post your notes. Vimeo has a great feature in that you can type a timecode, say “3:45” for example. This timecode becomes clickable, and links directly to that timecode in your posted video. You can even password protect your video for only your team to see.

3. Weekly Team E-Mail.

Stay in communication with your team. Let them feel informed and apart of a community. Send a weekly e-mail to your team, or a once a month newsletter or whatever fits your team- the point is, keep your team informed and motivated.

Here are some things you could include in your regular communication to your team:
–Important Church Stats & Insider News: celebrate salvation and baptism numbers, share great stories of life change, share a testimony, share news about the church, share any ‘insider’ information

–Team Celebrations: share birthdays, anniversaries, baby announcements, salvations, baptisms, etc.

–Service Evaluations: send links to where you have evaluated the service (see #2 above).

–What’s Coming This Week: include information about your upcoming Sunday or event. You can include what series you are in, what the message will be on, special instructions for a performance or creative moment or any other pertinent information that would set your team up for success.

What practical things do you do to set your team up for success each week?

CARL BARNHILL
Creative Director / Owner
[twelve:thirty]media | Columbia, SC
twelvethirtymedia.com

Carl Barnhill has served on staff at some of the largest churches and organizations in the country. He served as Media Director at Precept Ministries International, directing the television and radio program Precepts for Life with Kay Arthur, broadcasted to over 98 million homes around the world. He served as Video Production Director at Pinelake Church in Brandon, MS, where he produced media content for four campuses, as well as led volunteer teams.

He most recently served as Video Coordinator for Newspring Church in South Carolina. Newspring has 10 campuses across the state with a weekly attendance of over 35,000. At one campus alone, the number of consistent volunteers serving in media production tripled, under his leadership.

He currently serves as Creative Director and Owner of [twelve:thirty]media, a company that serves churches and ministries all over the world through motion graphics content and church media coaching.