If your group keeps having students come to a meeting and not come back there may be various reasons for why they don’t come back. Many times though it’s because students don’t feel like they fit in.
This idea will work for any group size, but really needs to be implemented once a group gets over 10-15 students. This post is based off of a blog post from Benson Hines who writes an excellent blog called Exploring College Ministry. You can take a look at his original post here.
Benson talks about instituting a new student leadership position of “Social Connector.” Pick a student who is good at starting conversations easily with new people and who is friends with the other people in the group. Think of a person who is an “influencer” (make sure you read about influencers in The Fuel and the Flame book we gave advisors at the conference) and tends to know a lot about other people’s interests and activities. Give this person the position of Social Connector and when new students come to the meetings they will start discussions with them and then proceed to connect them with students who have like interests. So, if Katie comes to your meeting and she likes ultimate frisbee your social connector can introduce her to Jennifer who is in the ultimate frisbee club. If Josh likes the New York Yankees the social connector can get him talking with Dave who also likes the Yankees and so on.
This is a great way, along with a contact form, to follow up with new students and make them feel like they are a part of the group and fit in. As Benson points out, some of these connections will happen naturally without the help of the social connector, but it’s still great to have someone like this in order to welcome people to the group. It would also be good for the social connector to write down in a notebook the new person’s name and who they connected them with after the connection has taken place. That way the social connector can follow up with the person who is already in the group later on and encourage them to be connecting with that person further (i.e. friending them on facebook, a follow up email, getting together to hang out, etc.).
In the Bible, the first church was centered around community and the best thing for your group is to build a strong community that makes students feel loved and involved. To quote Benson’s post: “Can you imagine each visitor to your ministry never leaving without at least one solid connection?” What are your thoughts on this? Does it seem like it would work well in your group? Does anyone already do something like this? Feel free to comment below.