Church sub-calendars are a great way to keep everything organized at your church. Setting them up is relatively easy and it solves the following 3 problems.
Whether or not you’re a program-driven church, there are things that happen in the life of your church each year. Keeping them all straight is important.
If you use your church management software for the master church calendar, you’ll probably accomplish creating church sub-calendars by using different admin groups.
If you use a Google calendar, simply click the dropdown arrow next to My calendars in the left-hand column and choose create new calendar for each one of the church sub-calendars below.
Other calendar systems typically have similar functionality.
Consider Your Audience
The main reason for creating church sub-calendars is to ‘control’ who sees what. A church admin or senior leader needs to see everything, but that can be totally overwhelming for someone checking out the website.
Or seeing everything could be totally inappropriate – the date & time of the next staff performance review for your worship leader isn’t really everybody’s business.
Create these 12 church sub-calendars so that every church event rolls up into one master church calendar:
Prayer Team: prayer events; reminders to send updates
Fundraising: appointments; desserts or other events; reminders to send thank yous, etc
Finances & Governance: annual budget preparation season; quarterly and annual Board meetings; annual report filing deadlines
Discipleship/Small Groups: dates & times of small group meetings; leader training events
Networking: appointments with civic leaders; reminders to follow up
Community Service: events; planning meetings
Marketing & Outreach: events/festivals; design & publication deadlines; online campaign run dates; etc
Staffing: performance reviews; job interview dates
Leadership & Training: retreats; leadership meetings; conferences
Communications (Internal): newsletters; social media posts; serving schedule publication dates
Preaching & Creative Team: sermon calendar; production deadlines; planning meetings
Assimilation & Membership: discovery classes; membership classes; etc
As your people create each calendar event, they just have to decide which church sub-calendar it belongs to.
You as the leader should be able to turn the sub-calendars on or off in your master calendar view so that you can see one, some or all of the sub-calendars at once. That way you can focus on just one, or see them all so you can…
Prevent Double-Booking
Once your church is up and running, it’s crazy how many times different teams will book events at the exact same time. It’s tough for a guitar-playing dad to be at band practice and the youth group parent meeting at the same time.
This becomes even more important for churches that have a 24/7 facility and have to manage who’s using which room which night.
Having sub-calendars roll up to one master calendar also helps you…
Prevent Over-Booking
Maybe you think you haven’t created an event-driven church. But once you overlay all the church sub-calendars above, what does that tell you about how busy you’re asking people to be? Setting a reasonable pace for your leaders and your congregation is easier if you have the raw data in front of you.
Use church sub-calendars as a handy tool to keep the goings-on at your church well-organized and available to the right audience.
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