This series on planning purposeful events continues with a focus on building effective event planning teams.

I was chatting with another women’s ministry leader last week, and she mentioned their church hasn’t had a retreat in about 10 years because it is so much work!

Maybe you’re in the same boat. Or perhaps you’re committed to hosting a women’s conference or retreat each year, and you’d love some tips for smoothing the planning process. Whether or not you land in either of those places or somewhere in between, this post is for you.

Today I’m going to be talking about planning teams for big events such as dinners, conferences, and retreats.

Do you need an event planning team?

Note: This post contains affiliate links.

Big events require a lot of planning and hands to pull everything together.

While you don’t have to have a separate event planning team, there are some definite benefits to bringing in some extra help for one specific event.

Planning teams:

1. Allow women outside of your team to serve and shine.
2. Provide a great training ground for future women’s ministry team members.
3. Lessen the load for your already busy women’s ministry team.

Even when I’ve served in a small church, setting up a separate event planning team was worthwhile. Did most of our women’s ministry team sit on the retreat planning team, too ? Yes. But we had several other women join us just to work on the retreat.

For every planning team I’ve led or served on, we’ve divided up the tasks. Today I’m going to run down the list of possible leadership positions and share a brief list of tasks they might be responsible for.

In future posts, I’ll talk in more detail about almost every one of these areas. If you need the information now, consider purchasing my resource Everything You Need to Know About Planning a Retreat or my Women’s Ministry Event Planning Course.

Event Planning Team Positions & Tasks

Not every member of the event planning team has to have an official leadership role, however, it does help to have a point person for several key components of the event.

Here’s a list of how you might want to divide up the event responsibilities.

This list can be helpful whether you’re setting up an event planning team or dividing up the responsibilities between the members of your women’s ministry team:

1. Hospitality and Food – this person or team recruits women to help create a welcoming environment and oversees any food and beverage needs for the event.

2. Prayer – this person or team oversees all prayer aspects before and during the event. Be sure to check out the post on Building Prayer into Every Step of Your Women’s Ministry Event for additional ideas for your prayer leaders.

3. Decorations – this person or team creates, purchases, and installs décor for the event.

4. Worship & Music – this person or team oversees all details related to the music sung and played at the event.

5. Registration – this person or team oversees the registration process.

6. Gifts or Goodie Bags – this person or team purchases items for and assembles goodie bags or table gifts for attendees that tie in with the event theme and scripture focus.

7. Publicity – this person or team creates and distributes event publicity.

Depending on the size of your event and the availability of your team leaders, you may be able to combine some of these roles. In many cases, you may only need a point person, not a whole team.

You may be wondering, when should we put an event planning team together?

In my experience, we’ve put together an event planning team after the women’s ministry director and women’s ministry team have already selected the location, the date, and our speaker for the event.

Depending upon the deadlines, we’ve usually asked the event planning team to meet starting 5-6 months before the big event.

You may want to do it that way as well for a few reasons:

1. Your women’s ministry team has already prayed through and agreed upon your theme/focus for the year.
2. Vetting a speaker is important work that should involve seasoned and discerning ministry leaders.
3. You’ll likely need to make those decisions on the location, date, and speaker many months before you need to assemble an Event Planning Team. I’ll address this in more detail in the next post when I talk about event planning timelines.

FAQ about Event Planning Teams

How often does an Event Planning Team need to meet? I recommend meeting once a month, with 2 meetings in the last month before the retreat. The last meeting may be a “working” meeting to assemble programs, name tags, goodie bags, etc. or a prayer meeting. The expectation is that some volunteers (especially for music and décor) will meet and communicate on their own as needed.

When should your Event Planning Team start meeting? About 5-6 months prior to the event date.

What do you discuss at your Event Planning Team meetings? I always plan a time of prayer for the event. Every leader gives an update, shares prayer requests, and requests help if needed. We communicate our speakers’ needs, if there are any. We give updates on registration numbers. We discuss and work to solve any other issues that have come up.

How do you recruit women to serve on the event planning team? Because this is a shorter-term project, you do not need to use a rigorous vetting process like the one I suggest for building your women’s ministry team. You can share a planning team meeting announcement with the women in your church.

How should we select team leaders? First, determine what team leaders you will need. If any of your women’s ministry team members will also serve on the event team, you may not need many additional leaders for those areas. You may wish to ask gifted women to serve in the some of team leadership roles before the first meeting, or you can wait and select them from those who come.

Does the women’s ministry director/leader have to be the Event Team Planning Leader or Coordinator? Not necessarily. Some women’s ministry teams have an Event Coordinator position.

Today’s Toolbox Tasks

1. Look at your ministry calendar for the next two years. Is there a big event coming up? If so, discuss whether or not you need an event planning team.
2. If you do need an event planning team, set a target date for recruiting team members and make a plan for when they’ll need to start meeting.
3. If you need to pull together an event planning team in the next couple of months, go ahead and brainstorm a list of women to ask to serve.

You may also want to check out:
Building Prayer into Every Step of Your Women’s Ministry Event
Everything You Need to Know About Planning a Retreat
Women’s Ministry Event Planning Course
Women’s Ministry Essentials
Rethinking Women’s Ministry Fellowships