We had a unique situation crop up this week and Nspire came to the rescue, this time for the benefit of our church custodian. It seems there is an outside group, a community college, that is having their commencement ceremony in our new Life Center this Friday evening. He had to set up 500+ chairs for the event, set the stage and make sure everything was ready for this group. This was a LARGE job for one man and we realized he needed a little help. Since I already had my regularly scheduled midweek Student Ministry worship service scheduled, we ended early and about 20 of us made our way over and helped him get the room set up in about 20 minutes. (I failed to mention that he had already spent an hour setting up 120 chairs. Had he continued at that pace the job would have taken him 5 hours).

Here’s where Nspire made a happy custodian: Some of our staff realized that he was going to have to put 500+ chairs away on Saturday. We decided we would shoot a quick email out to the adults in our congregation. The result? We sent over 300 emails out to the adults in our congregation this morning (using the mail-merge feature). We inserted some tokens to make it personal, and asked them to come and help put everything away at 9am this Saturday. He had no idea we had done this, but was SO EXCITED to hear that we had a crew that was going to be here to help him get the job done!

In 2 minutes we put together an email that took 10 minutes to send out, we got about a dozen responses and saved HOURS of work! Beyond that, we have a very, VERY happy custodian who often does a very thankless job. Our people were made aware of a need and they responded! Nspire saved the day again!

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In my ministry I have resources that get borrowed a lot. I’m sure anyone out there in the trenches like me has the same scenario. The problem I had for quite some time was finding a system that worked. I did card files, lists, and a whole bunch of other methods, but none really worked for me — I couldn’t follow-up easily. Then, about 7-8 years ago, I had a student enter all of my resources into the Nspire library.

We now track board games, recreation equipment and Cd’s, as well as books and magazines from my personal library. For the last 12 years, I have been a subscriber to Interlinc. They send a shipment of music to my church once a quarter (usually there are a dozen Cd’s in each shipment). We literally have HUNDREDS of Cd’s in our music library, students are constantly wanting to borrow them.

The library function works very well for us and allows us to track our resources. As soon as I get a new shipment, I give the box to a volunteer who writes a call number on the Cd and Jacket with a permanent marker. She does the same for new board games, or other resources we acquire. If a student wants to borrow a Cd, they simply find one of my volunteers and we check it out for them.

I also used to have problems with students getting board games out, but they would often “forget” to put them away. (Anyone else out there share this problem? Can I get a witness?!?) There is now some accountability built into borrowing a game — if it is left out, all we have to do is check who signed out the game! All of a sudden, this “problem” went away! The same scenario has played out with cue sticks, ping-pong paddles and any other loose items (like video game control paddles, game disks or cartridges, etc.).

How did we do it? We created several categories: Recreation Equipment, Music, Books, Magazines. Then we gave each item a call number, Cd’s currently have a 5 digit number starting with Cd (ex: CD001), we can easily look up the item, then click on check out, find the student’s name and viola! It’s done! Their name shows up in a column to the right of the resource, along with their phone number.

We don’t have nearly as many problems with missing resources — all we need to do is make a phone call, or send an email and our resources find their way back home! When we notice that a bunch of resources are out, we’ll do a contact blitz and ask that our resources come back home to our Teen Center. I’ve been very pleased with this system because it allows me to share our resources with our students without the worry of them never coming back. Yes, occasionally something will get lost or damaged, but with the ability to follow-up, we don’t lose nearly as many resources as we did prior to initiating this system. My limited ministry dollars are no longer spent on replacing missing items!

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