A funnel wrapped in a pipeline shrouded in process

The idea of a pipeline/funnel is a fairly well understood concept.  It is simply a metaphor to describe stages that something (people, product, or a process definition) is in; for example a sales pipeline might look something like this

When you are talking about people in a pipeline, you expect to have fallout (not everyone makes it from stage 1 to 2) so the pipeline may actually look more like a funnel; such as this assimilation funnel

If you need x people, you must feed a proportionally higher number into the front/top of the funnel.  To improve the output you have two options:

1. Increase the number of people coming in the top of the funnel
2. Improve upon the number of people that process from one stage to the other

The Lighthouse ministry at [Mariners Church] very purposefully examines their volunteer service opportunities (VSO’s) and categorizes every volunteer job as a wide, middle, or deep level of involvement.

• Wide – a wide level job would likely require very little to become a participant in; no real commitment, no background check
• Middle – requires a little bit more; you may need a bg check, commit to every week, and require some sort of accountability
• Deep – you know, you really should be getting paid for this; this is like free part/full time help

At the end of the day, Lighthouse wants to see a wide mouth of “wide” level opportunities funneling down to narrower deep opps.  They theorize that you must have a broad base of opportunities to “get your feet wet” to adequately staff the middle and deep tiers.

To come up with the right numbers, you can’t simply say “I have 10 wide jobs, 6 middle, and 2 deep”, you have to consider the number of opportunities for each.  Let’s say that being an usher is a mid level job, if you have 10 ushers for each of 3 services, you have 30 middle opportunities with that job every week.  When you multiply that out over the year, the numbers get quite large.

In addition to understanding the number of opportunities, you also want to understand how many of those are actually accounted for with your volunteer base.  The graphic below is NOT an actual representation of what Lighthouse has, but it does represent what they were going for.  In reality, once they ran this report for the first time, they discovered that they didn’t have enough opportunities on the top of the funnel and purposefully went out to find more ways that people can plug in without a big process and commitment.

Something to note, is that this is actually a 2nd funnel of a greater funnel.  The funnel that would live outside of this is simply volunteer interest; how many people expressing an interest in volunteering does it take to get one volunteer (last I heard it is something like 1 to 8 maybe?).  This “inner” funnel then is part of the “care” that must be used to help expand on the number of people moving from one stage to the next helping to move the 1 in 8 to 1 in 6.