If you’re doing something right with your ministry, you are mobilizing volunteers to get involved in every way possible.

But there are two practical problems with leading volunteers across the different ministries of a church:

First, you need to hold many meetings so that everyone is on the same page (including you!), especially if there are many people involved. A coordinated effort requires a lot of dissemination of information, collaboration and a tons of basic communication.

Second, because you are working with volunteers, not staff, they aren’t always available physically to meet in the same place at the same time.

In the business world, conference call and video conferences are the norm. But for some reason, suggest that people dial in for a ministry meeting via conference call, and people seem perplexed.

The truth is that conference call services used to be expensive, hence affordable only when the costs could be justified by business. While your team’s time and efforts are no less valuable, the cost of conference call services have plummeted. It’s time to embrace this tool in your daily work as a team leader.

Here’s one way to set-up a free conference call dial-in number you can use today:

One of my favorite collaboration tools online is Drop.IO. A neat feature they offer (free too!) is a personal conference call number with each and every free team page/account you set-up.

Once you set-up a new custom collaboration page at www.drop.io, you’ll see a custom conference call dial-in number on the right column. (We’ll explore some of the other neat-o benefits in another future post)

This conference call number is all yours as long as the drop.io page is live (you can change how long the page exists in the settings to up to 1 year after the last visit). It is a reservation-less conference call dial-in number that you can pass out to use whenever you need.

If you want to set-up unique dial-in numbers for each of your ministry leaders for their own teams, just set-up additional drop.io pages for each group. Voila! Every team can collaborate as often as they wish on their own.

BONUS TIP: If you want to have certain calls recorded so that you can distribute them to other people that missed the meeting or would benefit from the contents of your meeting, you can 3-way conference in the “voicemail” number which is listed on the same page. Voicemails are saved and posted as mp3 files to the drop.io page within minutes. You can download them or even use the direct link to the file that’s made available with the recording.