Vacation Bible School Follow-up
VBS is over, now what? Well, you probably need a little rest! But don't rest too long. If your church is like ours, you had a lot of children attend VBS whose families do not normally attend your church. We, as a church, have an obligation and a privilege to follow-up with those families.
Here are a couple of suggestions:
Visitation Blitz:
Have a huge visitation blitz, and enlist staff and lay leaders to make a personal visit to every family whose child visited during VBS, whether or not they indicated that they attend another church . Make this a front-porch style visit, just to thank them for letting their child attend VBS and hand them a gift bag from your church. The response just might surprise you.
Search Builder can find those who fit the criteria you choose. Once you find them, you could print the Inreach Outreach Report with Form and pass those out to your volunteers to make the visits. Then have them complete the form based on their results and return the forms to the church. If you start the day with donuts, coffee and a pep talk, it will be great fun and very rewarding. Just be sure to enter those results as contacts.
Here is a suggestion for a possible search:
- Recent Attendance Count greater than 0 for Vacation Bible School. If you have a division for VBS, just specify the Program and Division and enter the number of days since the first day of VBS. That would find everyone who attended, whether they enrolled in a VBS organization or just visited at all during the week.
- Family Has Primary Adult Church Member - and set the value as False. This finds those children whose parents are not church members.
- In Bible Fellowship equal False. This would eliminate those who are enrolled in a Life Group/Sunday School.
- Primary Resident Code is 'one of 'Metro or Marginal. This focuses on children with local addresses.
If you want to naritem the search, you could add this condition (if you asked this question during your registration), Active in Other Church, with the value set to False. This would return just those children who indicated that they do not attend church elsewhere.
Email 'Thank You':
Use the same search, but email everyone with a special video message from your children's ministry (or your pastor) with clips/pictures from VBS and an invitation to come back on Sunday.
Assign Tasks:
Depending on how many people you have to follow-up with, you might want to run a similar search and assign tasks to your staff or lay leaders to make phone calls or visits. When you do this, they will enter the Contact when they complete the task. This will give you some great information to help evaluate any prospects.
There are lots of ways to do follow-up after a big event. Decide what works best for your church and do it, using BVCMS to help.