Ideas for Signing Up

Thanks to Linda Hill -- she mentioned to me yesterday that you have to be a follower of the blog to comment. I was able to change that in the settings. Now, anyone should be able to post a comment to the blog. I hope this will increase the amount of discussion we can have.

Sorry for missing yesterday. I was distracted. Working on a better focus today!

I've mentioned the advantage of a time-bound group in encouraging new people to sign up for a group. It is easier to ask our guests to commit to a specific period of time (10-12 weeks) than to join a group that continues ad infinitum. In addition, the group will all be starting together at the beginning of this time period -- rather than asking our guests to join a group that is already in progress.

Let me discuss the ideas the book, Activate, shares about signing up. The book is very clear that you should have a one-step sign up, with three different options. One, the groups catalog will be in the bulletin during the entire inviting month. It will have a response card attached. Participants can sign up for the group they want in worship and place the response card in the offering plate. Two, we'll have a sign-up option on our website so people can go home, look at all the offerings more closely, and sign-up simply by submitting their group choice, name, and email/phone. Three, the last two weeks, we'll have a sign-up table in the foyer, staffed by small group leaders. This is a place where people can get questions answered and sign up.

This is a quote from the book, "One of the keys to creating a strong full-participation small groups system is to make groups easy to get into and get out of. You make them easy to get into by establishing a one-step sign-up process, and easy to get out of by setting solid end times and end dates."

I do hope that this will encourage stronger participation than Sunday School currently allows. My goal for our first semester of sign-ups in the fall is 200 people. If we achieve that goal, we can expect between 15-20% of people that signed up NOT to show up -- so that puts us around 170-160 participating. Our current SS avg attendance is around 75-80. If we reach our goal, it would automatically double the number of people involved in a small group. I realize that we have other small groups besides Sunday School -- I am generalizing based on the groups we keep attendance for.

The book encourages us to allow 15-20 people to sign up for each group -- and encourages us to combine groups that have less than 8 signed up. This is from Big Idea #2, "Groups with 7 members or fewer are difficult to lead and more likely to fail, which means they have little to no chance of fostering healthy relationships or spiritual growth, while groups of 12-15 do both more effectively." I can tell you that I have observed this to be true for our Lenten group studies, generally speaking. Practically, this means we need to have 2-3 more groups than we think we will need, and be prepared to combine groups to keep the numbers in the 12-15 range.

Finally, once someone signs up, my commitment is to follow up with them within 36 hours. If they sign up on Sunday, I will contact them by Tuesday to let them know their sign up has been received. Also, the group leaders will get a contact within 24 hours so they can follow-up and give appropriate information about time, date, and location of the group. That is key to success of getting people to show up, once they've signed up.

I hope this gives everyone a better idea of what the month of inviting will look like. Love to have your feedback.