Check-In/Sign-In of Children
This is a very important consideration when developing a Children’s Ministry program. The below list a few things to think about when developing your sign-in area:
- Safety of Children – An important consideration is a system to ensure the safety of the children. Making sure the children to be signed in by their parents or responsible adult as well as picked up by the same is vital. This is especially important when you are in a large church where the volunteers may not know the parents of all of the children. Even if you are in a smaller church and everyone knows everyone, you do want to put some sort of system in place to account for the parents dropping off and picking up their children.
There are many systems out there that are designed for helping with offering a more secure sign-in process. A simple solution that doesn’t cost much can be printing sign-in forms on three-part NCR paper (paper that allows duplicates) and have the forms *numbered in sequence (click here for a sample). Have the parents fill out the form, tear the top copy off for the Sign-in Worker to keep, have the parent take the other two copies to class with the child. Once at the class, have the teacher take the second copy and give the last duplicate copy to the parent. The parent should bring this with them to pick up their child after service.
*Why are the forms numbered?
I suggest numbering the forms so that if you have to page a parent that is in service, you can discreetly have them paged by using the number on their form instead of using the child’s name. If you have viewing screens in your sanctuary and your media department is willing, you can have the number put on the screen to page the parent if needed. Many larger churches utilize the viewing screens at the front of the sanctuary which makes it easy to page someone. If you are a smaller church and don’t have screens, then you can possibly have the parent pulled from the service by an usher or another volunteer and the numbering system is not necessary.
For a more sophisticate check-in system and faster record keeping, here are a couple of systems to reference:
- Church Community Builder
- Fellowship One Church Management Software
- Kingdom Hound Children’s and Youth Ministry Software
- Customer Service – For many first time visitors, the Children’s Ministry Sign-in area is the first point of contact between them and the church. How friendly, helpful, kind, and understanding the Sign-in Team/Worker is may determine whether or not a parent checks their child into Children’s Ministry or even if they return for another visit! Our sign-in teams should have smiling faces, courteous attitudes, and over-the-top service to all of our families.
- Record Keeping – If you are using any type of database to keep up with your church membership, the Children’s Ministry Sign-in area is a frequent place where database errors and/or updates are discovered. Train your Sign-in Workers to take down any information that needs to be changed in the database and turn that information in to the main office or whoever takes care of your data entry. You may even feel comfortable allowing your Sign-in Workers to make the edits or changes if you are working with a computerized system – but if your church has a staff person that manages the database, I suggest turning all edits into that person and not changing the information at Sign-in in order to minimize possible confusion. The decision on who makes the edits is all determined by the protocol at your respective churches; but at minimum, the Sign-in Team can be responsible for documenting changes that need to be made.
I also suggest making the necessary changes quickly, preferably before the next time you open your Children’s Ministry. Nothing communicates “I am not important to this church” more than when a person tells you of a needed database change or their child needs to be entered into the database and they come back week after week without the update being made. Don’t make this mistake (ask me how I know)!
