VBS 2023
For the last several years, I have been planning Vacation Bible School at a non-profit church in my hometown. This involves logo and branding work, organizational/administrative work such as managing sign-ups, printing & organizing materials, and ordering t-shirts/banners/etc., and event planning skills such as activity planning, organizing volunteers, and creating schedules. I find it exciting to manage many different areas of a project and see everything come together in the end! This page focuses on my role in planning VBS 2023!
The VBS planning process started with deciding on the theme and working on the logo and branding! My co-director and I decided on “Good New Neighborhood,” where kids get to discover what it was like to be a kid when Jesus lived. This was a curriculum we had done before, but we decided to give it a brand-new look and identity. Find out more about this logo in my branding section.
After the theme of the week has been selected, we selected a theme for each day. These themes follow the same format… Jesus has ____, we do too. Then, with the help of the pastors, Bible stories were selected relating to each of those themes. Finally, we start brainstorming rotation activities.
There are 5 stations at Vacation Bible School, including (1) art and crafts, (2) reading the Bible story, (3) doing a Bible story-related activity, (4) doing an activity to serve others, and (5) games. My co-director and I came up with names for each of those stations, designated their locations, and mapped out what activities would occur at each station throughout the week.
Four months before VBS, we shot a promotional video during Sunday School. This video was storyboarded and scripted ahead of time, and teachers were given a short line for their kids to practice. Then I went from classroom to classroom and shot footage of each group of kids saying their part. This video was later edited and sent to the congregation, urging them to sign up!
As the event week got closer, we started pushing out more promotional materials. Banners and yard signs were designed, ordered, and placed outside of the church a few weeks before VBS. I designed a page in the bulletin calling for parents to sign their kids up. Posters and flyers were hung up and placed around the building for people to take. We wrote email campaigns and posted material on social media.
As kids began to sign up, we divided them into groups based on their age. Each group was called a “tribe,” had 4-7 kids in it, and had 1-2 high school or college-aged “tribe leaders.” Each tribe traveled through activities with one or two other tribes, so we named each traveling group after one of the 12 tribes of Israel. For example, Tribes 17 and 18 were both part of “Simeon”.
Organizing people and thinking through the logistics of how several different activities can occur at once is one of my favorite parts of event planning! My co-director was the one who physically divided the kids into groups, but all of the organizational work of keeping track of who was where and when was largely done by me!
T-Shirts! I placed the logo I had created onto T-shirts, added a back design, tallied up how many of each size were needed, and placed a T-shirt order through a local screen printer. After picking up the finished shirts, each was folded to fit into a plastic bag and labeled with a child’s name. The bags were organized into groups and distributed to children on the first day of the event!
During the week before the event, we made final preparations and decorated the building.
I created offering envelopes! Each day, kids could bring an offering amount of their choice, which went towards purchasing new bedding for a homeless shelter. I printed the logo on square address labels and stuck them to small envelopes.
I also placed signage on the pews with each child’s name so that they knew where to sit at the beginning and end of each day.
Lastly, I am in charge of music! At the beginning and end of each day, everybody gathers in the sanctuary and sings and dances to VBS songs. For the last several years, I have been in charge of selecting the songs and leading the dances.
As a part of this process, I have to create lyric slides to be displayed on the TVs at the front of the sanctuary while the songs are being played. While I am leading the songs up front, someone else sits in the back and clicks through the lyrics as the songs play through.
Included are a couple of photos of me leading this part of the event! Usually, other high school-aged volunteers make their way to help me lead by the end of the week, but all of the songs and dance moves are chosen by me!
VBS 2023 was the first major event that I planned, and it is where I discovered my love of event planning! I found it very interesting to have such a large organizational role, knowing that I was approaching everything through a design lens. I came to appreciate how much design could play a role in the back end of event planning, making many of the behing the scenes components easier to understand. I created spreadsheets and documents to compile all of the scheduling and sorting, designed neatly in the brand colors I’d selected. Many of the people I worked with on this project noted how much they appreciated using these documents as resources!