Skills and interests are the foundation of volunteer management for your church. When you assign individuals skills and interests, or allow people to choose their own, you can use this information to help discover potential volunteers for teams.

Realm provides a default list of skills and interests, which you can add to and edit as needed. If you make all of your changes to the list of skills and interests before you enable them for your church, you can finalize the list before allowing potential volunteers to choose from it.

If you want to see who is associated with skills and interests in your church, you can print or export this. You can also create a custom query for specific skills and interests to know exactly who in your church has a certain spiritual gift.

Create a skills and interests handout to pass out to your church. Or allow people to choose their own skills and interests within Realm.

If you've previously been tracking skills and interests using a list type custom field, you can move this profile data to the skills list. This will delete the current list of skills and replace them with your own data.

Potential Volunteers

When you first assign skills and interests to an individual, they become a potential volunteer. These are people who are not yet a part of a team, but have skills and interests that match a role. Realm provides potential volunteers as suggestions when you add people to a team or to a schedule.

SHAPE and DISC

SHAPE and DISC are both common assessment tests that churches use to evaluate a volunteer's potential. These tests aren't mandatory but are good ways of discerning where a volunteer could fit if they're interested in sharing their gifts with your church. While SHAPE determines which spiritual gifts would fit best, DISC acts as a personality assessment. The "P" in SHAPE stands for "Personality", so the two assessments can work together to find the perfect volunteer for what you need and can be part of the same pathway if you choose to use them both.