A Quick Start Guide for Organizing Your Youth Ministry Files

A user-friendly filing system is a vital asset to any ministry; yet, few who work with youth take time to think through and set up an easy-to-use filing system. Instead, we willingly spend countless hours searching through stacks of paperwork, magazines, or boxes for an illustration, a story, an idea, etc. that we know we have somewhere.

Setting up an easy-to-use filing system is not as difficult as it seems. The following ideas can serve as a quick start guide to help you in establishing or revamping a filing system.

Organize by Categories
Take the kindergarten approach to creating a user-friendly filing system by setting up a "category" system rather than the old "A-Z" system. For starters, divide your filing system into five general categories . . .

• Events
• People
• Resources & Orgainzations
• Topical Teaching Resources
• Your sermons, studies, lessons, etc.

You would then file all related items in alphabetical order within their respective category. Filing by category permits your filing system to expand within each section as the content grows.

Add a Splash of Color
Create a color-coded filing system by using a different colored plastic tab for each category. For example, use . . .

• Red tabs for Events
• Green tabs for People
• Blue tabs for Resources & Organizations
• Yellow tabs for Topical Teaching Resources
• Orange tabs for your sermons, studies, lessons, etc.

The colored plastic tabs allow you to use the less expensive hanging "green" folders.

Organize for Retrieval; Not Storage
One of the biggest challenges of filing is "Where do I file this?" When choosing where to file specific items, you should focus more on "finding" and less on "storing." Ask yourself questions like . . .

• Where would I go to look for this in the future?
• Under what circumstances would I look for this?
• What "topic" search would most likely lead me to retrieving this item.

Be sure to name your "topics" according to how you think you will LOOK for them, and group similar documents together, whenever possible.

Speaking of Categories
Your "event" category is for files of each event in your youth ministry. Each event file should contain all the documentaion relating to that event.

Your "people" category contains files on both your student and staff/volunteers. To avoid becoming liable for invasion of privacy, all files in your people category should be in a locking file because of the confidential information they will contain.

Your "resource & organizations" category is where you place informational files on vendors or organizations that you use in youth ministry.

Your "topical teaching resources" category files are topical files that contain illustrations, quotes, borrowed sermons or lesson outlines, news articles, etc. These files would contain anything that you might use in developing sermons, lessons, or curriculum.

Your "sermons, studies, lessons" category contains individuals files for each completed message, study or lesson. Each file should contain the completed outline, your study notes, the reaction you recieved, and anything else helpful in developing the message.

Finish the Challenge
Organizing your files can seem overwhelming, and you might face the temptation to quit before finishing. However, for your new filing system to achieve the intended purpose of making life easier you must see the process through to the end. Once you have completed the initial task of organizing and setting up a user-friendly filing system, it is simply a matter of filing your new materials regularly.

A few hints and tips:
These hints and tips might make your "filing" life a little easier . . .

• Use staples instead of paper clips whenever possible. Paper clips take up more room than staples and can cause filing and retrieval to be more difficult.
• If you save relevant articles, consider cutting out the article and writing the necessary bibliographical info on the article rather than saving the entire magazine or newspaper. Clipping the articles help you avoid "space gobblers" who can quickly eat up your filing space.