Sound Tech Training

[chaselivingston]

Not sure if this has already been done or not, if so, please point me in the right direction. But I would like to see a post on how some of you recruit and train new volunteer sound techs. I'm pretty much the only guy who runs sound regularly at my church, so it would be nice to have a break every once in a while, but we just don't have anyone who expresses interest in learning how to run sound. I would love to hear some of your stories.

[Stuart]

Hi Chase - Jim has a lot to say on volunteers both leading and recruiting as well as other areas so I hope he chimes in.

However, from my perspective I've always found it best to enlist the pastor (or one of them) to do the recruiting as they

a) typically have a better insight of what the skills / interests are of the membership (especially truer of smaller gigs) and
b) folks find it much harder to say no to the pastor than to you or I a mere worker drone.

Once you've got them on board I'm sure the training side will be a lot easier, but keep your eye out for new folks joining the church and see if they have an interest. One thing I did was to tap up the youth - having a child in their grouping made it easier for me to approach them and gave me a natural in.

It also helps that sound can be considered a cool thing and if they have a musical bent anyway then it's going to be easier than recruiting for ushers (which was what I used to lead).

If any other wisdom strikes me I'll be back.

Stuart

Not sure if this has already been done or not, if so, please point me in the right direction. But I would like to see a post on how some of you recruit and train new volunteer sound techs. I'm pretty much the only guy who runs sound regularly at my church, so it would be nice to have a break every once in a while, but we just don't have anyone who expresses interest in learning how to run sound. I would love to hear some of your stories.

[chaselivingston]

That's some great advice Stuart. Our music director is considered the staff member in charge of the tech ministry. She does a great job, but we're not very strong in the recruiting new volunteers area. Guess I'll just have to keep pushing it...

[dvbc-jim]

Chase, I realize this is an older post but don't stop at the music director if you have. Go to the head pastor. When I joined the church I am at, I had a meeting with ours. When I told him what I had done at other churches I had been involved at he introduced me to the music director. Head pastors are the one everybody wants to go to so they are privy to way more information about people than music directors.

Jim