This week we hear from one of FellowshipOne’s most experienced employees, Matthew McMaster.
My name is Matthew McMaster and I have been an Implementation Manager since March of 2004. In that time, I have implemented FellowshipOne at over 1,000 churches. Some of them are very sophisticated in how they communicate within their ministries but most of them have a real silo issues.
Silo issues occur when each ministry functions as its own separate entity with little or no regard for the larger entity (The Local Church) as a whole. For example, the Youth Pastor has their new students complete a first time visitor card. This seemingly ordinary process can have a huge impact on the information silo problem.
When taking a closer look at the first-time visitor card you may notice it is missing some very important information. What are the parent’s names? Does the student have any siblings and what are their ages? What is the best way to get in touch with the parents? Does the new student have another church home? In response to the missing information, the Youth pastor might say “that information isn’t necessary for me to reach that student.” THIS is the silo mentality. The Youth Pastor is forgetting that the student is part of a larger entity, the family. Each family member is a potential soul needing to be reached. Each member of the family is part of the target market for other ministries at The Local Church.
Another example of a silo that I have seen is when working with multiple ministries to coordinate volunteer activities. There really is a best practice process for first time visitor with children and it involves “Super Greeters” who escort a family from one classroom to another explaining the check-in and pick up processes. The “Super Greeters” naturally come from the Greeting team which is a separate ministry from the children’s ministry. On many occasions I heard the following response from the leaders in this ministry: “Why do I need to staff Greeters for the Children’s Building? That is their responsibility!” This silo mentality is detrimental to both the volunteers and first-time guests.
There are many other types of silos but I think you get my point. So now you may be wondering “how do I break down these silos?” The answer is deceptively simple… Cross Functional Teams. In this blog I will mention 2 specific Cross Functional Teams but you can have many more. The first is the Fellowship One Champion Team. My next blog entry will discuss how this team functions.
