Volunteers at the Helm

Most churches will utilize volunteers within their congregation to some capacity for their audio and visual needs.  

Volunteering in your church is not only about helping with the operational needs of the ministry 

but also about enriching the whole community and building life-long friendships.

Serving as a volunteer can be one of the most fulfilling experiences.  

But often those who volunteer for AV have no idea what they’re getting into.

Lack of support and training will lead to frustration and burnout.

First off, It’s super helpful to nominate an AV  leader or overseeing person who has ample technical knowledge.  

This person might be employed by the church. They might be a volunteer who is knowledgeable about AV  

or it might even be a contracted person from outside the church.

With that said, the AV leader should have the following main roles:

Maintain the systems.

This doesn’t mean that they have to repair everything themselves. But they need to be able to identify a problem  

or broken piece of gear, so they can either purchase the right replacement part

or hire the right person and/or integrator for the solution.

The AV leader will be the person to establish a  unified technical protocol for volunteers to follow

so that volunteers know exactly what’s expected from them.

More on that in a bit.

The AV leader should be the one to schedule the volunteers

since they will know best the technical capabilities of the volunteers.

With that said, here are some helpful protocols that can be implemented

to help ensure a productive and smooth experience for the volunteer tech and ultimately the church as well. 

1. Your volunteers must be trained on how to use the equipment they’re operating.  

Training can take place as a specific event but it is more realistically done while on the job during sound check and while service is happening.

Making detailed how-to videos specifically related to your churches setup and operations

is super helpful and will prepare a new volunteer before they ever touch the equipment.  

Which brings me to number 2.

Never leave new and/or unexperienced volunteers alone to run sound.

Though a volunteer may know what buttons to push at a certain time,

if they haven’t yet learned troubleshooting skills  

and a problem occurs, the volunteer will not know how to fix it.  

This can be a very disheartening experience for them.

It leads to frustration for everyone. 

And number 3.  

As your more experienced volunteers gain skills, 

pair them up to work with less experienced volunteers.

This not only allows the new volunteers to learn new skills, but reinforces those skills in the ones teaching them. 

And number 4.

Because most volunteers will generally not understand all the routing and signal flow in a system,

following a unified and systematic technical protocol is essential.

Here is what a unified technical protocol looks like:

On the stage, each instrument should have a pre-assigned channel on the stage box or floor pockets to plug into.

Label those inputs clearly so that the volunteers know exactly where an instrument should be plugged in to.  

Leave a few blank channels for instruments that might not be part of a normal worship setup.

All monitor wedges should have a unified position on stage and output assignment on the stage box or floor pockets.   

In-ear monitor outputs should have a pre-determined output designated for each position as well.

Here's a word of caution.

It’s not wise to re-patch these output assignments  

or an unsuspecting volunteer will come in on the next service,  

and find that a monitor doesn’t work and will have no idea what happened to it or what to do to fix it. 

On the mixer, everyone should be working from a unified scene or session.   

The input channels on the scene should line up with the input channels on the stage; 1 to 1.

Here’s a word to the wise, just because you CAN re-patch or soft patch, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Soft patching is a flexible function in our digital mixing world  

where you can assign a channel to a different channel.

This is very confusing to a volunteer.  

Keep everything 1 to 1 when working with volunteer operators.

Create and make use of instrument channel presets on your mixer.  

It’s helpful to have an experienced engineer dial in the pre amp gains,  

EQs, dynamics and FX for the specific instruments that are used on a regular basis for worship.

Save those presets to the user library.  

Teach the volunteer how to pull in instrument presets for that specific instrument or vocal.  

In addition to storing user presets,

the TouchMix-30 Pro offers world class factory instrument presets that will get you 80% of the way there

and which are sounding great if you don’t have an experienced engineer who can help you get dialed in. 

Here are a few tips for maintaining the stability of your sound system: 

After an experienced engineer has dialed in your PA system,  

restricting access to certain things like amplifiers and DSP processing gear might be helpful.

On hardware pieces you can use grill plates to do this.  

Once your routing is set up on your mixer, it’s a good idea to add restrictions on this as well. 

To do this on the TouchMix, you’ll need to access the security settings by pressing the “Menu’ button and then selecting “Security” on the screen.   

The security screen will present a text field to enter a password and two options labelled “Security settings” and “Log out/Lock”.

To setup your initial passwords you’ll need to select the “Security settings option.  

The security setup screen will display four different password fields  

allowing you to create varying degrees of access and restriction with multiple passwords.  

Someone who is proficient at mixing and has a strong understanding of the tools and features of the mixer

could receive the “All Access” password because you trust in their ability.  

Someone who is new and doesn’t have the experience or knowledge yet,  

might receive the “Levels Only’ password, which will lock them out of the more complex processing  

and router features, resting access to fader control and panning.  

There is also a step between which will unlock the mixer in simple mode.

Whether or not you intend to use all passwords when setting up security,  

all password fields must be entered for the security feature to work properly.  

If a password field is left blank, the mixer will automatically default to the next level of access after any blank field.

So take the extra few seconds and fill in all passwords  

with unique and independent passwords and then write them down somewhere.

You don’t want to get stuck locked out of the mixer because of a forgotten password.

It is also important to note, that the admin password must be entered in order to change or delete passwords at any time. 

When all is said and done a perfect operating protocol for your tech volunteers doesn’t guarantee perfection

and it certainly doesn’t guarantee that everything will run smoothly at all times.

The servant’s heart attitude on the part of both the AV leader and volunteer is key to making this ministry a fulfilling experience. 

But, having a framework to work within and guidelines to follow will help everyone to know better what’s expected of them. 

That’s it for this video. Move on to the next video whenever you’re ready. See you there!