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EFFECTIVE PREPARATION

Clarify Expectations

Clarify expectations with your team.  Consider outlining expectations for different groups involved and the different stages of the event.  You might outline expectations for the team members, the team leader, the field partner, and the sending organization.  You may also outline expectations leading up to the event, the event, and post event.  

 

Provide Resources

Create an experience that’s going to be a success for your team members; provide them with resources like fundraising tools, ways to connect with other team members, educational resources, information about the partner, and any other resource you feel important.

 

Educate about Tools

For organizations who are using ServiceReef, each participant has their own personal fundraising page where they can share their stories, post a personalized message and video, and provide a means for donors to help support them… make sure they know about this.  You may have a number of tools that you have created for short term trip participants; make sure your participants know about them!  

 

Encouragement

This may be a first experience for many of your participants, so be sure to help encourage their journey as a trip participant, in their fundraising, and how they share about their story.

 

Share Stories

Encourage your participants to share their stories, and these start long before the actual event. For organizations using ServiceReef, your participants can share stories at any point in their journey and these stories aggregate together for the entire team to create a team blog.  This is a great way to share the bigger vision for missions in your organization.  

 

You are a steward of their missional journey.  

One big mistake we often make as leaders is putting all the focus on our staff and forgetting that we have an army of extremely “bought in” trip leaders. Shift gears and instead, think of your leaders as more than great people who lead your trips but people who can carry your vision forward.

To participants and field partners, here are some suggestions on how to engage your trip leaders to a higher calling: 

#1 Equip them. Remember, they might be your greatest tool for mobilizing your audience to mission. Help them become better recruiters, mobilizers, and senders. 

#2 Encourage and gift books. There are so many great mission books (When Helping Hurts, The Great Omission, Shadow of the Almighty, and so on.). Consider having an annual book you purchase and send out to all of your trip leaders to continue building their own personal mission philosophy and worldview. 

#3 Appreciation meals. Host appreciation meals for your trip leaders to pour into them, keep them connected, share what’s new and upcoming, and to allow them to build a tighter community with each other. Spread these out throughout the year to avoid the “see you next summer” mindset that some trip participants and leaders may accidentally fall into. 

#4 Provide trainings. Host at least one annual trip leader training. Whether it's by video or something else, the most successful we’ve seen is for organization to have a time where you stop thinking about everything else and focus on your larger purpose for mission trips. 

#5 Brainstorm sessions. Host brainstorms sessions throughout the year (especially out of peak trip season to keep leaders engaged) and collect feedback on ways to do things better: preparation, process, communications, resources, debriefs, and more. 

#6 Give note & gifts. Sure, giving gifts for a volunteer role may not be the norm, but think creatively about this. Sending a note card and a $5 gift card to Starbucks to say thanks for all they are doing goes a long way. 

#7 Recognize the work. While trip leaders may be working with you on the direct details of a specific trip, they are often mentoring and connecting with their participants long after the trip. Be sure to recognize and thank them for continually pouring into the people. 

#8 Invite to team meetings. Invite trip leaders to key team or staff meetings when you are working through short-term logistics, strategic changes that impact them, and/or celebrating key things. 

You have a unique opportunity to equip and send so many people. We often fixate on the trip participants and forget what amazing resources we have in our trip leaders. More so, these trip leaders really can essentially be your pro bono staff members giving you an army of equipped mobilizers. 

Action: Select at least one item from above that you can implement this week. Maybe it's having a zoom call over coffee with a few team leaders and asking them what they need most to be equipped well. 

This is just one strategy of five (5) we have for doubling your impact. Download all five (5) strategies you can implement immediately that will double your missions impact.

This post is written by Will Rogers. Will is the Co-Founder and CEO of ServiceReef.

Six Tips for Effective Short Term Trip Recruiting

1. Alumni - Reach out to alumni who have served with your organization before or have specifically been to this location or worked with this partner.
2. Clarify the Win - Quickly state the purpose of the trip and who you are looking to recruit as a team member.  The more clearly you clarify from the beginning, the better chance you have of finding a great match.
3. Call to Action - Don’t miss the opportunity to create a clear call to action in each of your communications.  This can be easy to forget, but remember to provide opportunities to sign up, learn more, attend an informational meeting, read stories of others who have served, or anything else that might allow them to take some small action step.  
4. Internal & External - Consider a balance in your team of those who are familiar with your organization and who may have served before, with those who may be on their first serving experience.  This should start now, with how and where you do your recruiting.  
5. Exhibit - Exhibiting at an event is a great way to share about your short term trip opportunities.  Place yourself in the shoes of someone you’re speaking with and ask what questions they might be asking.  They are probably wanting to know what you have that would match their interest and skills.  Be prepared with upcoming opportunity lists.  You may also ask if they are interested in a specific opportunity and if you could follow up with them on that.  
6. Follow Up - No matter what your first engagement point is with an individual, make certain you follow up with them!  This is the impression you are leaving with an individual.  Treat them with respect and honor their desire to serve. 

You are a steward of their missional journey.  

Have a Plan

You always have to start with a plan.  Benjamin Franklin once said, “failure to plan is planning to fail”.  Your plan should include dates, team leaders, expectations, preparation, resources, travel logistics, legal resources, fundraising tools, communication plans, and more.  

Work the Plan

It might sound simple, but once you have the plan, work it!  Review the plan at least weekly with the lead team for each event and make sure you're keeping your deadlines.  

Have a Team

Working with a team makes all the difference.  Most of us aren’t wired to do everything… we aren’t great at leadership, finances, administration, communication, follow up, and all the other aspects.  Create a team that compliments all the needs of an effective team. 

Utilize Tools

Tools should work for you, not the other way around.  Consider a tool like ServiceReef.  Most organizations will spend over 150 hours managing a single short term trip. ServiceReef enables organizations to manage trips in less than 40 hours.  Spend the time where it counts and not in the administrative weeds.  You have a task to equip people for missional engagement, keep focused on the main goal!  

Is your missions trip cancelled? Cancelling (or even rescheduling) your short-term trip may not be the only option.

It’s worth considering if there are other options like repurposing the trip into something local (actually, this post works regardless of if you also cancel or reschedule the trip). It all comes down to the original purpose of the trip and working to extrapolate from that trip its purpose.

Let’s take for example a Youth Trip or Vacation Bible School (VBS) trip in Poland. The heart behind the trip is to engage high school students in a VBS program and have them engage well with younger kids and help make the program a success.

Now let’s see where we might be able to take that same group of high school students and engage them now or in months to come in a similar purpose.

• You could have those high school students working to creatively build things for local kids to do while they are in a quarantine.

• You could have those high school students reaching out to family with young kids to see if they have any needs during this time.

• You could have those high school students sign up for a local VBS-type program this summer

• You could have those high school students reach out to local teachers to ask what they are doing to help parents and see if they could help.

   

It’s really quite simple if you stop to think back about the original purpose and goal for the trip and then mine out a means to do that locally. Truth is, many people are quite bored and your creative ideas here could both help engage your participants and help a lot of people in your local community.

This is one post of many we're doing related to the current crisis. Download Cancelled: A Guide to Maintaining Missions Engagement When Your Short-Term Trip is Cancelled.