Inexpensive Ways to Improve Your Kids Area

By: Anthony D. Coppedge

Church children’s staff and leaders put untold hours into preparing for each child that will come to a church service or special event. When a little bit of effort goes into making the children’s area fun and bright, churches make the kids’ experience more engaging and enjoyable. This experience is not lost on visitors, who are typically hesitant about leaving their children with people they don’t know. However, their hesitation is instantly alleviated when they see when a church makes a statement with their facilities about how important those kids are.

Fun Colors!

While theming out a space is ideal, a little color goes a long way towards creating a bright and inviting place that belongs to kids. Brightly colored walls not only liven up a hallway or kids’ room, marketing psychologists advise that a lasting color impression is made within 90 seconds and accounts for 60 percent of the acceptance or rejection of an object, place, individual or circumstance.

Bold colors such as red and orange should be used as accents, as too much typically overwhelms children. Also, brown, black and gray are seldom chosen by children, except to create an outline.

High-quality signage – and lots of it!

It seems so simple, but churches don’t often put a lot of thought into the design, size, location and quantity of signs. These are critical for making it easy for new comers to find their way, allow kids to identify which area is “theirs” and provides a sense of belonging and ownership to kids. Small tips include making the fonts big and non-serifed and making sure that arrows point to the next direction step. Use as many signs as is necessary for waypoint finding. Simple and obvious is the key.

A great idea is to use double-sided, perpendicular signs for rooms, making it easy to see from both directions.

Make check-in fun & efficient

Kids check-in may be the most important part of your first impression for guests and visitors. Use lights, colors and signage to make check-in both obvious and fun! If you have the space, make a separate first-time check-in area that’s bright and inviting, staffed with super volunteers wearing T-shirts just for Children’s ministry!

When it comes to check-in, there’s just no two ways about it: electronic check-in makes all the difference in both security and efficiency. There are plenty of church management tools, such as Fellowship One and Church Community Builder, which offer robust check-in solutions, even for very small churches. In fact, systems like these include self check-in, which is about 500% faster than assisted check-in.

One easy tip here: use stanchions to create line queues, so that people never get into the “slow line”. With a queue, the next person in line gets the next open check-in station, eliminating being in the “wrong line”.

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Anthony D. Coppedge is the Director of Sales and Marketing for Worlds of Wow, Inc. Worlds of Wow specializes in creating themed environment for children’s areas.