Adding, Building & Managing Your Church's Response Teams

Overview

This article walks you through what a CarePortal Response Team is, why they are important, practical ways to recruit, train, and manage your teams, as well as the technical steps to create and build your team in the CarePortal platform.

Intended Audience

Church Leaders: Primary Point Person, Team Leaders

Included in This Article

• What is a Response Team?
• Benefits of Response Teams
• Recruiting Response Teams
• Managing Your Response Teams
• Technical Steps to Add a New Response Team
• Technical Steps to Add Responders to Response Teams
• How to Deactivate a Response Team
• Customizing Your Response Team Settings

What is a Response Team?

Response Teams are a feature in CarePortal that enables churches to organize and build teams of responders. Response Teams can help churches create greater impact in their communities by having more options for people within the church to rally together to respond to requests. Having multiple Response Teams not only improves response rates, but also minimizes turnover and burnout. Although building these teams may require some effort, it sets the stage for sustained, meaningful engagement by your church.

Response Teams are the primary vehicles that churches have to create meaningful connections. Team Leaders have the incredible opportunity and responsibility to help prepare, train, and debrief their responders as they meet local needs together.

Benefits of Response Teams

There are many benefits to having response teams, including (but not limited to):

• Increased impact: More responders, more responses, more kids served!
• Decreased burnout and bottlenecks: More responders help diversify the work across more people and teams. This prevents any one person or a few people from becoming burnt out.
• Lasting meaningful connections: more responders, more possibilities for lasting connections!
• Leadership development: Response Teams create a unique opportunity to build up and raise up leaders who can become Response Team Leaders.
• Discipleship process: Having response teams allows hands-on discipleship opportunities as responders meet requests and Team Leaders come alongside to offer support and discipleship.
• Larger community influence: More members of the church with training to engage trauma and poverty within your community

Recruiting Response Teams

Each church will have a different posture when it comes to best practices for recruiting response team members, based on their own ministry and process. It can be helpful to think through how your church already asks people to be a part of things. Here are some additional suggestions:

• Ask people directly
• Ask through ministry groups
• Ask through digital media
• Ask from the pulpit

Your Local Network Leader will be the best guide to equip you and direct you to the available resources.

Managing Your Response Teams

Preparation

There is an incredible opportunity when new responders join a team or a completely new team is formed to learn best practices on creating meaningful connections. It is vital to always remember that the child is our why. CarePortal does not exist as a delivery tool but rather as a facilitator tool to create and help sustain meaningful connections through the means of meeting tangible needs.

A Response Team's primary function is not just to meet physical (Tier 1 - Tangible) needs, it is also to create connections where relationships can be built, spiritual healing can take place, and hopefully where the most vulnerable in our communities can find sustainable communities who care.

Team Leaders can meet with their team to prepare responders on a few things and answer a few questions:

1. What request are we responding to?
2. Where is the request?
3. What can we expect as we respond to the request?
4. How can we lead in our response with humility, gratitude, and servanthood?
5. How can we see beyond the need to address spiritual needs or other physical needs?

Response Teams are set up to help create discipleship within your church.

Training

In addition to briefing responders on what to expect, it is also vital that Team Leaders take the time to understand and train their responders on best practices and mindsets to remember when responding to a need. There is a seemingly endless list of training topics that are relevant to Response Teams, including:

• Best practices for responding to requests
• Poverty
• Trauma
• Dignity
• Working with Agency Workers
• Discipleship and evangelism

CarePortal has developed a recommended Response Team Training curriculum covering these topics that your network leader can facilitate for you and your teams. You're welcome to ask them about that and develop a plan to equip your team in this way.

Response Teams are truly at the front lines of the James 1:27 ministry, caring for the widows and orphans. As your team grows in these various areas (and the countless others you can dive into), you will likely be able to identify new leaders who can create another response team which helps to diversify your church's reach into your community.

Debriefing & Next Steps

After a Response Team meets a need, there is an opportunity to connect and process through what they just experienced. Some needs are very straightforward and may warrant little debrief time, while others can be very weighty and difficult to understand. It is important to help team members process what they are feeling and what they experienced to prevent them from burnout or discouragement.

Taking time to process through some prepared debrief questions can also be a place where you discuss how you and your team can further your support of the family that was just helped, if appropriate. This time is also a great space to discuss the impact and gather stories. Storytelling is a powerful tool that can be used to help create momentum, cast vision, and pull others into the mission of serving vulnerable children and families. 

Here are some storytelling best practices to keep in mind when it comes to photos and videos.

Technical Steps to Add a New Response Team

Church Leaders with any of the following roles have the permission to create a new Response Team:

• Primary Point Person
• Pastor
• Connecting Church Leader
• Church Needs Leader

Here's how to do it:

1. Go to the Response Teams tab. There are two ways to access this tab, either through the sidebar under Team Management or by clicking the Response Teams header on the Settings tab.
   
   
2. Click the + Add Response Team button.
   
   
3. Provide the following information for the new Response Team:
     -  Team Name (displayed publicly)
     -  Physical Address (determines which requests this team receives)
   Note: This is helpful if you'd like to create additional teams for small groups from your church that want to see requests that are closer to where they meet
     -  Team Leader (more leaders can be added later via the Edit button in the Response Team tab)
   
   
4. Click Submit. The new team will be in Active status, and the Team Leader will start getting request notifications. Make sure the Team Leader is trained and approved by a church leader before adding their Response Team.
   
   
5. If the Team Leader doesn't have an active CarePortal account, they will receive an email to set their password and access their Team Leader dashboard to manage their team's settings and responder list.

Technical Steps to Add Responders to Response Teams

There are several ways responders can be added to Response Teams. A Church Leader can manually add them through a bulk upload or individually. New responders can also sign up independently through your Response Team's custom sign-up form or by responding to a request and selecting your church during their account creation. Continue reading to learn more about each of these options. And remember: you can always reach out to your Local Network Leader when it comes to these settings for further support or clarification, if needed.

Church Leaders Manually Add Responders

Add Pre-Approved Response Team Members One by One

1. Click the Add Responder button on your Responders tab under Team Management in the sidebar
   
   
2. Fill out the form with the new responder's information
   
   
3. Click Submit to add the new responder

Upload a List of Pre-Approved Response Team Members

This option allows you to bulk upload a list of responders without adding them individually.

1. Click the Upload List button on your Responders tab under Team Management in the sidebar
   
   
2. Download the Sample File provided in the pop-up window, which gives you the format needed by the CarePortal platform to add your list successfully. Remember: there is no limit to how many responders can be on a Response Team!
   
   
3. Follow the instructions on the pop-up

Responders Sign-up Themselves

There are a few strategies and options to encourage your various church members to add themselves to a Response Team according to your church's approval settings:

Responder Sign-Up Form

• Share your team's Public Responder Sign-up Form
    -  You can find this form in your Custom Links section on your Dashboard tab or the button on your Responders tab.
• Ideas for sharing the sign-up form:
    -  Set up a tablet or laptop at your church with the link
    -  Send text invitations to church members with the form link
    -  Prompt church members to text a keyword (e.g., "CarePortal") to an auto-reply service that includes the sign-up form.

Guide Members to Respond to a Request and Select Your Church in the Sign-up Process

• When responding to a request, CarePortal guides new users to create an account, including selecting their church (if applicable).
• When they choose your church in the sign-up process, they will be added to your Default Response Team (which is based on your church's settings).
• Direct church members to your church or team's Public Page, where they can respond to local requests. Public Page links can be found on the Dashboard tab of church leader dashboards.

How to Deactivate a Response Team

To deactivate a Response Team, any Church Leader can easily do so from the Response Teams tab. Here's how:

• Go to the Response Teams tab, accessible either from the sidebar under Team Management > Response Teams or through the Settings tab and clicking on the Teams header
• Click the 3 dots icon next to the team you'd like to deactivate
• Click Deactivate Team

If the team you intend to deactivate is the Default Response Team, the Primary Point Person will need to first reassign the default team status to another team.

• To reassign the Default Response Team, click the 3 dots icon next to the team you'd like to make the new default team and click Set as Default Team

Should you ever need to reactivate a team that has been deactivated, follow these steps:

• Under the filters icon , select the deactivated status to display any deactivated teams
• Click the 3 dots icon
• Click Activate Team

Customizing Your Response Team Settings

See this article to learn more about the options and settings that determine:

• How new responders are approved to join your response team
• Who those responders are connected with when they respond
• What kind of requests your team receives
• And more!