Getting started with Ministry Grid
Dan Iten avatar
Written by Dan Iten
Updated over a week ago

We know when you sign up for Ministry Grid, you want to get up and running as quickly as possible so you can start training your volunteers. This article is designed to help you get started and contains many helpful links and videos that will help you begin implementing Ministry Grid at your church.

Create Your Church's Organization

The first step to getting started with Ministry Grid is to create your church's Organization. Your Organization is the environment your entire church will use to train its volunteers. If you want to add different ministry areas, instead of creating a new Organization, you will create Groups to help organize your people.

Please note: You should be prompted to create your organization immediately after your purchase of your subscription. Within your Organization that you set up, you can manage all of your people and training in one location.

Answer Two Questions

After you have created your Organization, the next step is two ask these two questions about training:

  1. Who do I want to train?

  2. What content will I use?

Who do you want to train?

When first rolling out Ministry Grid at your church, we recommend starting with one ministry area. This will allow you to set up your systems and processes before sending it out to the entire church. Then once you see success in that one ministry area, you can share the success story with others areas and have more buy-in when they jump on board.

So to get started, choose a ministry area. For example: choose your Kids Ministry Volunteers.

What content will I use?

Now that you have chosen who you want to train, you'll want to decide what content you will use to train them. This way when you invite your volunteers into Ministry Grid, they have training they can start with right away.

So to get started, choose what training content is needed for your ministry area. Head to our Training Catalog to see highlighted content and our full list of training categories.

Create Any Groups (if necessary)

Now that you know who you want to train, you will want to create any groups that these volunteers will be a part of. This way you when you invite them into Ministry Grid, you can organize your volunteers.

Build Your Content

Now that you know who you are wanting to train and have created Groups, you will want to build the training content you will assign to your volunteers.

Before you start building, it will be helpful to know how training is organized in Ministry Grid. There are three components to training:

  1. Courses are a bundled sequence of training. A course might be comprised of 1 or 2 videos to watch, a listening guide to download and use, and a website to visit to find additional resources.

  2. Steps are the individual pieces that make up the training course. So a video or a PDF download would each be a step in training.

  3. Pathways are a combination & sequence of courses that are assigned to users. A workflow supports the scope & sequence of training and allows training to better build on top of either other.

When deciding what content to build, you have a few options:

  • You can choose to start with any one of our 700+ courses that can be found on our Search page and use it as is.

  • You can customize any one of our courses or pathways, so that it fits your church's context. Many churches will mix and match our content with their own videos and documents.

  • Of course, you can also create a new course and create a course using only your content that you upload into Ministry Grid.

Add People to Ministry Grid

Now that you have created your groups and built your initial training, you are ready to add your volunteers to Ministry Grid so they can start training.

We've tried to make adding your people into Ministry Grid as easy as possible while also giving you many options. There are 4 options for you to choose from:

  1. Adding their Name & Email

  2. Bulk Import

  3. Easy Link

  4. Advanced Invitations

You can check out this support article to learn which method will be best for your church.

Each volunteer you add to Ministry Grid will need to create their own Ministry Grid account so you can track their progress and assign them individual training.

Follow-Up and Ongoing Training

After you add people into Ministry Grid you can track and monitor their progress and continue to assign them ongoing training.

  • If you want to track progress on your people's training, you can go to Manage Assignments.

  • If you want to assign training to those who are already in Ministry Grid, just follow these steps.

  • If you want to coach your people and take notes on their training, you can do so in the Coaching feature.

If you follow these steps, you should be off to a great start of using Ministry Grid to train and equip your volunteers.

If you have any other questions about how to use Ministry Grid, you can check out our support page at https://support.ministrygrid.com/.

You can also chat with our team directly within the tool. Just click on the chat on the bottom right of your screen.

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