How many VBS families are actually new to the church?

Fewer than the sign-in sheet suggests, and more than a quick glance would guess. A week of 80 kids might produce 15 households nobody on staff can place. Some of those are grandparents’ guests who live two states away and will never be back. A handful are a family three streets over who has been meaning to try church again. The follow-up board is how you tell those two groups apart instead of guessing.

Should every VBS family get a phone call?

No. A call to a family that already has a home church, or that only came because a cousin was visiting, wastes a volunteer’s evening and can feel like a sales pitch to the family. Sort first — regulars, known guests, and true unknowns — then spend calls on the households where a real conversation matters. That sorting takes twenty minutes and saves days.

What if a family gives a phone number but never answers?

That is normal and not a dead end by itself. Log the attempt, note the date, and try a different channel or a different week — a text a few days later, or a note at the following Sunday if you know their neighborhood. Three unanswered attempts over three weeks is a reasonable point to move the case to inactive rather than let it sit open indefinitely.

Who should own VBS follow-up if the volunteer coordinator is exhausted by the end of the week?

Not the same person who ran the week, if you can help it. VBS coordinators are typically spent by Friday and follow-up done poorly is worse than follow-up done a week late. A staff member, an elder, or a rested volunteer with a short, specific list of names and one clear ask — call, note, or invite — will do better than an exhausted coordinator with a long one.

Does software fix VBS follow-up on its own?

No. Software gives the list an owner and a date so it does not quietly disappear, and it shows you which cases have aged past a week with nobody assigned. It does not make the calls, write the notes, or decide who follows up with whom — that is still a person’s job. What it removes is the specific failure mode where a good list sits in someone’s inbox until it is too old to be useful.

What to do with VBS families after the week ends

Vacation Bible School ends the way it always ends: a fellowship hall full of crepe paper, a stack of sign-in sheets with sixty names on them, and a volunteer coordinator who has not slept properly in five days. Somewhere in that stack are a dozen families the church has never met before. By the following Sunday, most churches have forgotten they exist.

That is not a failure of heart. It is a failure of handoff. The people who ran the week are the wrong people to also chase down every new family, and the sign-in sheet was never built to survive contact with a normal week of ministry. What follows is a way to take that stack of names and turn it into a short list of actual next steps — without pretending every family on it wants to hear from you again.

Start by sorting, not calling

The instinct after a big week is to start dialing numbers on Monday morning. Resist it for an hour. A VBS roster of eighty kids might represent forty households, and those forty break into three groups that need entirely different responses:

Already known. Members and regular attenders whose kids came to VBS the way they come to everything else. No follow-up needed beyond a thank-you if you are sending one at all.
Known guests. Families who have visited a service before, or whose grandparents attend, or who showed up at last year’s Christmas program. Warm, but not new — they already have a name in the system.
Genuinely new. Nobody on staff can place them. This is the group the week was actually for, in terms of reaching people the church was not already reaching, and it is usually smaller than it feels on Friday afternoon.

Sorting takes twenty minutes with two people who know the congregation and a printed roster. It is the single highest-leverage thing you can do before anyone picks up a phone, because it stops volunteers from spending Tuesday evening calling a grandmother who has attended for eleven years.

Give each new family an owner and a date

Once you have the genuinely-new list, the next mistake is emailing it to a committee. A list with no single owner gets a little bit of attention from three people and a full response from none of them. Each family needs one name attached to it — a staff member, a small group leader, a rested volunteer — and one date by which that person will have done something: called, texted, or set aside a name to greet in person next Sunday.

This is the exact shape of a follow-up board: a guest becomes a next step with an owner and a date, and the board makes it visible when a name has sat untouched for a week. SundayBridge's follow-up board works this way, and it ages cases that nobody has picked up so they do not quietly fall off the bottom of someone’s inbox. The board does not make the call for anyone. It just makes sure the call has a name attached to it.

If you are running this off a spreadsheet instead, the same rule applies: add an owner column and a date column, and check it weekly. The tool matters less than the discipline of one name, one date, per family.

Match the ask to what the family actually did

Not every new family wants the same thing from you. A family that dropped their kids off at 9 a.m. and picked them up at noon, and never set foot in the building otherwise, is not ready for an invitation to Sunday worship. They are ready for a thank-you and maybe a note about the fall kids’ program, if one exists. A family that stayed for the closing program on Friday night, sat through the whole thing, and lingered afterward to talk to a teacher — that family might genuinely be testing the water.

Read the actual behavior before deciding on the ask. A first invitation pitched too high — join a small group, come every Sunday, meet the pastor — can feel like a bait and switch to a family who thought they were signing up for a week of crafts and songs, not a recruitment pipeline. The honest version of church growth admits that most VBS families came for their kids, not for you, and that is a fine place to start.

Write down what you actually know, not what you hope is true

When a new profile gets created for a VBS family, resist the urge to guess at things you do not know — whether they have a church home, whether they are interested in more, whether the kids loved it or tolerated it. Write down what actually happened: dropped off Monday through Thursday, picked up by dad each day, mom stayed for the Friday program, gave a cell number and said “maybe.” That is useful. A guess dressed up as fact is not, and it misleads whoever picks up the case next.

A person’s profile in SundayBridge carries this kind of detail as an engagement timeline — the actual record of contact rather than an impression of it — so six months from now, if that family shows up on an Easter Sunday, whoever greets them can see the real history instead of starting from nothing.

Set a real end date on the attempt

Some families will not answer. A cell number given at check-in on a Wednesday afternoon, written down by a tired volunteer, is not always the number they check, and not every family that gave one meant it as an invitation to be called. Three reasonable attempts over three weeks, logged each time, is enough. After that, move the case to inactive and let it go.

The alternative — a list that stays technically open for a year because nobody wants to admit it did not work — helps no one. It clutters the board, and it quietly trains whoever manages follow-up to ignore old cases altogether, including the ones that might still be worth working. A clean close is a form of honesty about what a single week of VBS can and cannot do.

Decide who does this before the week starts, not after

The best time to assign follow-up ownership is during VBS planning, not the Monday after. If you wait until the closing program to figure out who is calling whom, you are asking your most tired volunteer — the coordinator who just ran five days of chaos — to also manage the follow-up, and that combination rarely goes well. Decide in March who will own the new-family list in June, and tell them roughly how many names to expect based on last year’s roster.

This is the same planning discipline that makes any church event pay off past its own week — the follow-up plan is part of the event plan, not an afterthought bolted on once the tables are folded up.

What a slow week looks like done right

A church of 150 running a VBS week for eighty kids might reasonably end up with ten to fifteen genuinely new households. Realistically, two or three of those will visit a Sunday service in the following two months. That is not a disappointing outcome — it is what a single week of contact with families who came for a craft table and a snack usually produces. The value of doing follow-up carefully is not that it turns fifteen households into fifteen new members. It is that the two or three who were genuinely open get an actual next step instead of getting lost in a stack of paper, and that your database ends up with an honest, useful record of who they are rather than a name on a form nobody ever opened again.

A short checklist for the Monday after

Sort the roster into known members, known guests, and genuinely new households.
Assign one owner and one date to each new household — not a committee.
Match the ask to what the family actually did during the week.
Log real details on each profile, not guesses about their intentions.
Set a three-attempt limit and close cases honestly when they run out.
Decide next year’s follow-up owner before this year’s week is even over.

None of this requires new software or a bigger team. It requires treating the stack of sign-in sheets as what it is: a short list of real people who spent a week trusting your church with their kids, deserving a response that is proportionate, honest, and does not vanish by August. If your guest follow-up process already has a rhythm the rest of the year, VBS season is just a heavier version of the same work, not a different kind of work altogether.