I know that adding something else to your calendar is not the most exciting thing to think about in the world. But I promise you that if you start putting parent meetings into your regular rotation, you’re going to gain some points with parents, even if they don’t show up!

Parent meetings are a great opportunity to communicate what’s happening in your youth ministry, connect with parents, and help them feel like they’re part of what you’re doing.

Here are a few things I’ve learned about making parent meetings successful.

Put Parent Meetings on the Calendar

The first thing I would encourage you to do is put parent meetings on the calendar in places where they make sense. For me, that usually means putting parent meetings at the beginning of school semesters. We often had just two a year: one in the fall and one in the spring.

These always felt like really normal times to have a parent meeting, mostly because everything else is getting started around that time as well.

Once you’ve got them on the calendar, make sure you communicate them through all your regular channels, like student ministry emails and even getting up front in church to let parents know that a parent meeting is going to happen.

Bonus points if parents don’t have to make any extra trips to church in order to come to your meeting! If you can schedule it during a service or right after a service and provide a meal, that’s a huge win. Making your parent meeting as easy to attend as possible is going to be your best bet for getting parents there in the first place.

Make Parent Meetings Fun

The second thing I would encourage you to do with your parent meetings is to make them fun!

We’re youth pastors. We’re all about having fun. Who says that our students should get all the fun energy?

Share some silly stories with parents. Play a game with them from Sidekick Pro and show off a little bit of what you know about having fun. Nobody needs another boring meeting!

If you can incorporate some fun into your youth ministry parent meetings, then parents may not roll their eyes the next time you invite them to come and find out more about what’s going on. You already know how to create an environment where students enjoy themselves. Why not bring a little bit of that same energy to your parents?

Make the Meeting Quick and Informative

The next thing is to make sure your meeting is both quick and informative.

Usually, it’s a great time to tell parents about everything that’s going to be happening during the semester. All the details they need to know about fall retreats or spring Disciple Nows, whatever you’ve got coming up, make sure you announce it and make a big deal out of it during the parent meeting.

Parents want to know what’s happening, when it’s happening, and what they need to do to get their students involved. One of the biggest wins I’ve found is to have sign-ups start while the parent meeting is going on.

If you have a sign-up link already live on the website, parents who are at the meeting can go ahead and sign up for the event while they’re sitting there thinking about it. You will absolutely get more parent involvement!

It’s a whole lot easier for a parent to register their student while they’re excited about an event than to hope they’ll remember to do it sometime later in the week.

And don’t try to be there for more than an hour. I promise you, your parents have other things going on, and so do you! Get them the information they need, have some fun, and let them get on with their day.

Give Parents an Incentive to Show Up

The last thing I would encourage you to do is give parents some incentive to show up. I’m talking about more than food and drinks, although that’s probably a pretty good idea!

Give parents some type of incentive, whether it’s a raffle for an Amazon gift card or making whatever big event you’re signing up for just a little cheaper because they showed up to the parent meeting.

That will encourage parents to want to come.

For example, you could make a special sign-up link for camp available only to parents who come to the parent meeting.

If they sign up through that specific link, it costs ten dollars less per student to register their kids.

For a family with multiple students going to camp, that’s a pretty good reason to show up! Things like this are huge wins for getting parents to attend meetings and helping them get on board with what’s happening in your youth ministry. And even if every parent doesn’t show up, you’re still communicating that you want to keep them informed and involved in what’s happening with their students.

Do you have any other ideas or something else that I missed? I’d love to hear about it!