Your VBS Needs Goals

What are your goals for VBS 2015? How many kids, teens, and adults do you plan to register? How many Kindergarteners are you preparing for? How many people will need to be fed during your VBS Celebration? I could go on, but you get the idea – YOU NEED GOALS.
Failing to establish goals – such as registration and daily attendance numbers, unchurched families discovered, professions of faith, and number of people that will be connected with ongoing ministries –  is a big mistake. Without goals it is impossible to make adequate plans.
Goals provide targets for allocation of budgets and resources, scheduling, room assignments, worker enlistment, curriculum and supply needs, and continued connections. The best way to determine goals for this year is to look at previous VBS experiences. If available, use budgets, registration and attendance records, and evaluations from previous years to help you determine appropriate goals.
By using previous VBS, as well as current Sunday School or ongoing Bible study, enrollment records you will better know how to plan and budget for this year. For example, if the largest age group attending last year’s VBS was third grade, there is a good possibility that the largest group this year will be fourth grade.
Goal setting begins with prayer. It is important to seek God’s guidance from the start instead of just asking for His blessing after all the planning is over and the event is about to begin.
A successful VBS must be a group effort from the beginning. The more people who buy into or acquire ownership of the VBS goals, the greater the likelihood that the goals will be met.
Invite your pastor, church staff, and core VBS leaders to join you in establishing goals. Goals should be realistic, but at the same time stretch you and your team to do more and reach more than last year.
Once you have determined your goals it is time to begin working out the details for accomplishing them. This is where goals can help you create target dates for accomplishing the tasks such as the number of workers that need to be enlisted each week or month. Your goals will also help you determine to whom and how you promote your VBS.
The schedule you choose, the number of classes and workers needed, and the budget needed should all be determined by your goals. At this point your goals are not only something you are trying to achieve, but they become the rule for making decisions and for insuring your VBS is what you have determined it to be. This is called goal based planning or starting with the end in mind.
A good example of failing to use goal based planning is the church that set a goal to use VBS to increase teen Sunday School enrollment by twenty percent. This would have been an attainable. However, during the VBS planning process the goal was overlooked and the decision was made to only offer VBS for children through the sixth grade. Without a class for teens, no teens were discovered, and VBS ended without the goal being realized. Goal based planning would have insured that a teen class was created and promoted with anticipation of meeting the goal.
By keeping goals at the forefront of the planning process you are creating a tool for healthy evaluation of your VBS and a foundation for future VBS growth.
So, how many workers do you need to have enlisted by this Sunday?
Join the conversation. What goals have you created for VBS 2015?