Building Resource Pages For Leaders And Teams
“Then you see how every student well-trained in God’s kingdom is like the owner of a general store who can put his hands on anything you need, old or new, exactly when you need it.” Matthew 13:52 MSG
As our teams get larger and we seek to train and equip more leaders I am wanting to encourage you to think through how you can capture your key, “evergreen”, communications to your teams and make them easily accessible for your leaders.
What key messages are you conveying again and again?
What are the ‘frequently asked questions’ amongst your team?
Is there a way for your team to access answers to those questions without trawling through old emails or wattsapp threads?
Two great examples of what this can look like are the “Team Pages” that Tina and Lara have put together for their Kids and Youth teams respectively. These are live on our website, and can be accessed through a link (but aren’t publicly seen through a tab at the top of the site).
https://croydonvineyard.org.uk/kidsteam
https://croydonvineyard.org.uk/youthteam
The very fact they’ve taken time to put together the team pages communicates value and trust to the teams. You can see on the pages things like:
Clear vision statements (why are we doing this?)
Team job descriptions
Best practice docs
Training and resource videos
A centre point for key safeguarding links
Other key documents the team members require
Having these resources page which can be linked back to again and again helps:
New members to solidify the initial training they’re given
Tie admin tasks, like DBS’s, to the big picture of why we’re doing this ministry
Keep current team members fresh on best practices etc
Leaders to have the information to resource themselves or pass on to others.
It’s fairly easy to tweak and adjust the pages over time - publishing new key information and removing anything that’s out of date.
An even easier way to do this is the ‘blog’ style pages, like the cv-leaders page, or the new page for VES team. These are good ways of capturing and ‘keeping live’ key communication that might have gone out over email.
Resource pages are obviously not a magic bullet, and don’t replace current training or comms, but it does reinforce them, and mean that good one-off communications can become good ongoing resources for our leaders and teams.
The website is obviously not the only way of doing it - some of you will have team google drives etc - but the advantage of the website includes - no passwords required and no danger of being edited - I also think it communicates a level of preparedness and professionalism that adds to weight to your leadership.
If you would like help in setting a page like this up for your area I am very happy to do so, just let me know.
- Andy 12/09/23