Last week I wrote a bit about our training and our new leader badges that had our WINS as a reminder for them in plain site (read the post HERE). I said I would talk about the QR code and new student follow up system.

We are only 1 week into this system, so we will adjust it if we need to moving forward, but we have seen it work pretty well. Follow up with 1st time students is SO important. We always say, “The first invite is always easy, but what is better than a first invite? A second one. An intentional follow-up invite back.” This is to help us make sure students don’t fall through the cracks. The best part about this… it’s not even my idea. One of our staff took this on, met with all our campuses to see how they follow up, came up with the best parts of what everyone was doing, and we made it a universal thing among all our campuses.

So here is what happens when a new student comes to one of our campuses:

  • A new student shows up to a campus and they check in. On the check in tables are these QR codes. They scan it, you can scan it now to see the form yourself, (if they don’t have a smart phone a leader can do it for them) and they fill out our form from CCB (Church Community Builder, our church data system).
  • Then they go to group.
  • If they for some reason didn’t check in, each leader has the QR code on their badge and they can have them do the same thing when they get to their group. Totally cool.
  • All the names get placed into a cue and our staff makes a profile for them and then pushes it to the correct campus and youth lead for follow up.
  • When they get the notification, it triggers a 3 automatic email follow-up for that student.
  • On Thursday, the following day, the lead will get an email to let them know who the new student was and their info. The lead will then connect with that small group leader and have them reach out to that student and the youth lead will shoot an email to the parents to introduce themselves, give general info about their campus, and let them know they are their to partner with them. They also get a general Sandals Church “We are so glad you came last night! Make sure to check out move.sc/youth” text.
  • On that Tuesday our leads will get another reminder of that 1st time student and they will remind the small group leader to reach out and invite them back tomorrow AND the youth lead will reach out as well.
  • Then on the Thursday (so week after the 1st initial connection) our leads will get a reminder to check if that student in fact did come again for a 2nd time. If so, the small group leader will reach out saying we are so glad you came again or if they didn’t come, shoot them a text letting them know they were missed we we hope to see them next week.
  • One of the most important things we can do is 1) remember a name and 2) let them know they were seen last week but we NOTICED they were not there and we wanted to follow up.
  • Then the cycle starts over for those who came that Wednesday.

Is it perfect? No. But is it intentional? Yes. We had over 50+ 1st time students last week so the system is in full swing right now with follow up so I will report back to let you know how it’s going.

Will all come back? We know that is not the case most likely. But I do know that more would be willing to come back because they were intentionally followed up with because we set up a system to remind us to do so.

@justinknowles3