How can my church plant use International Freelancers & Virtual Assistants?

Do you want to know one of the greatest tools to help your church plant? What if I told you that there are people from around the globe that you can hire for projects such as design, web, video, audio, architecture, data entry, IT, marketing and more? The world of freelancers and virtual assistants is at your finger tips.

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God's given you a vision to plant a church. You're gifted and maybe have the team ready to go. However, there are thousands of details and hundreds of questions that you have. In this podcast we will answer some of the common questions and answer listener submitted questions to help you fulfill the call the Lord's given you.

Danny Parmelee: 00:08

Welcome back, everyone, to 101 questions at church planters ask. I'm your host, Danny Parmelee. And today, we're gonna be talking about something that I'm guessing some of you aren't aware of even exists, and some of you may have found this a little secret and are already using it. We're gonna be answering the question, how can I use international freelancers and virtual assistants for my church plant team? I wanna start out by sharing how I stumbled upon this whole freelancer thing and why now I'm addicted to utilizing this resource.

Danny Parmelee: 00:42

See, when our church plant was growing in number, but our finances weren't growing at the same pace, we were always understaffed. By that I meant, we just didn't have enough money to hire all of the pastors and staff that we needed, or that we saw other churches hiring that were of the same size. And so, we were forced to utilize contract work. I think a prime example of this would be in graphic design. If we needed to create some sort of postcard, or a new logo, t shirt design, or a website, and we would find a freelance graphic designer.

Danny Parmelee: 01:17

Now sometimes this was a recent college grad, maybe a stay at home mom, or someone who was running a business, you know, out of their house, and I couldn't afford to walk into some big marketing firm and, you know, ask them to create a website for me. So instead, I would, you know, hire these freelancers to be able to do it. Now this of course was before Wix and Squarespace and the Easy WordPress, you know, templates that were available, so a lot of that you can even just do by yourself now. But was really kind of forced to kind of enter the freelancer contract world. So when hiring a freelancer like this, it was always a per project basis.

Danny Parmelee: 01:53

I could say, hey, I need a postcard for our Christmas Eve service, you know, can you come up with three to four concepts for me? Allow me to pick one and, you know, make some modifications until we get it right. And of course, ask them, okay, how much is this gonna cost me? They give me a price. We'll say maybe $300 for the sake of the argument.

Danny Parmelee: 02:11

Then they would come up with the concepts. They would email them to me. I would either call them or email them back, make some tweaks, some suggestions. Finally, they deliver the final file to me, and then I can bring that to the prints printers. So this was fantastic because it was affordable, and if they did well, I could use them again.

Danny Parmelee: 02:28

If they didn't do so well, then I could go find someone else. Oftentimes, I never met the freelancer in person. I think the first time that I heard of virtual assistance, when I was reading a book by Tim Ferriss called, The Four Hour Workweek. Pretty popular business book. And it kind of dawned on me, wait a minute, maybe I don't need to limit my choice of freelancers to just people who live in the city that I do, but I could expand to other cities, other states, even other countries, and that's when I discovered the beauty of overseas or international freelancers and virtual assistants.

Danny Parmelee: 03:09

I tried a couple different websites that facilitate this process, and currently my favorite one is upwork.com. Each one I'm sure has their advantages and disadvantages, and I'm gonna cover some of the basics in this podcast of how to use Upwork specifically. But if you're really serious to see how this works, I want you to head over to the blog, churchplantersask.com, and I am going to have a YouTube video that you're going to actually watch me put together a project step by step, so that you can see how easy this actually is. And because, yes, I still use international freelancers today in my job, and even for this very podcast. Right now, the podcast that you're listening to was mixed by Ricardo, who's an audio engineer from Spain.

Danny Parmelee: 04:01

The blog that you'll visit was designed by Monica. She's from India. And some of the social media graphics were done by Danilo, who is from The Ukraine. And so for the demonstration or tutorial, I'm gonna hire a freelancer to create new podcast, you know, thumbnail cover art for me that I'll actually be using. And you'll kind of watch my screen, I'll do a screen record, you'll kind of see how I, go through that process.

Danny Parmelee: 04:29

Now, just gave a few examples of how to use freelancers, but I want you to expand your understanding. There are freelancers that do just about anything that you need. I'm gonna list a few examples here, just to kind of give you an idea. If you need to hire an architect to give you different options, maybe for a chair layout, for a school gym, or you're renting a warehouse, you need to see what that's gonna look like, how many chairs you could actually fit in there, or different arrangements. I've done this one specifically multiple times for church planners.

Danny Parmelee: 04:59

You can hire a freelancer to do map work for you. They can put pins and maps, create a large scale even on a on a wall of, you know, other area churches, or put pins, you know, with a list of addresses of your team members. You can hire a freelancer to do demographic research for your city. You can hire a freelancer to run your social media completely for you. Now I don't recommend this, especially in the beginning, but just as an idea.

Danny Parmelee: 05:25

As I mentioned before, if you wanna create cost effective, you know, way to kind of launch a website, logos, graphic design, merch design, brochures, business cards. Yep. It's all there. Now if you have a website, maybe you wanna hire someone to help you even with some of the back end stuff, like search engine optimization, or using marketing tools like Facebook Pixel, or Google AdWords, or to set up your Google Analytics and reporting. Again, you could probably spend hours trying to learn all of this stuff, or you can hire a freelancer, get it done get it done well.

Danny Parmelee: 05:59

Have an expert do it for you. I mentioned architecture already, but understand, when I say that, I mean, you can get high quality three d renderings. This becomes super helpful when you're trying to cast vision for a space. So let's say for example, you're gonna rent out a space, maybe you're gonna do a little bit of a build out. Instead of paying thousands of dollars to a local architecture firm, you can hire a freelancer for hundreds of dollars to give you a video walkthrough of a three d rendering.

Danny Parmelee: 06:29

By the way, message me if you want a really good three d rendering person. Alexandra from Slovenia. I use her all the time. She's superb. I'm sure she'd love to do some of your projects as well.

Danny Parmelee: 06:41

And even if you need someone just to create a visual, like, for your connection booth, like, hey, this is what I'm thinking, you kinda wanna pitch it, to your team. I mean, you can just get just about get anything done. So let's say you have some large outreach event, and people fill out, you know, a card as they, you know, come up to your bounce house or do whatever, and all of sudden you have a thousand response cards, and at this time you don't have, you know, your own assistant or team members are just overwhelmed doing other things. Yep. You could hire someone, you know, online, hire one of these overseas freelancers, and they will literally just type them all up for you, put them into a spreadsheet for you.

Danny Parmelee: 07:21

So I could go on and on. These are just a bunch of of ones to just kind of give you an give you an idea. So let me share with you three advantages of using an overseas freelancer. First and foremost is gonna be cost. Because of the wage difference and economy of The United States, your dollar will get much more, go much further outside of The United States.

Danny Parmelee: 07:45

Maybe you've experienced this before, if you've ever traveled outside of The United States to countries where, you know, you do this simple exchange rate math and you see that, you know, what you're able to purchase with the American dollar in other countries goes considerably more. So the same thing happens on these freelance platforms. You know, if you hire a graphic designer, you know, freelancer in The United States, it wouldn't be unreasonable, you know, to pay 20, you know, $30 an hour, you know, even much much more than that. Whereas in other countries, if you paid someone 7 to $10 an hour, you'd be paying a very fair wage to them. Now let me give you a word of caution and wisdom here.

Danny Parmelee: 08:24

If you're not careful, you could take advantage of people in other countries. There are people in other countries that will work for as little as $3 an hour, which may even be categorized, in my opinion, as slave labor. So remember that even though someone may agree to this, don't take advantage of someone's desperate situation, you know, you know, you're a global ambassador for Christ. So make sure that your parent, you know, paying fair wages. Sometimes just a little bit of research and you'll be able to understand, you know, other countries economy and standards, so that, know, it's you figure out the fair wage in that area.

Danny Parmelee: 09:03

So later on on the podcast, I'll share some of the countries I like to work with most. Bottom line, hiring overseas freelancers, you'll see your dollar travels much further. Number two, is speed and availability. When you post a job on a freelance website, you have people that are ready to work in a start right away. I mean, you could literally see just like, you know, using Facebook or Instagram.

Danny Parmelee: 09:27

You can see who's online, and man, you could even talk to them right then, and get worked on like within minutes type of thing. Because think of this for a moment, you're not limited to the city that you live in, but the entire globe. I've been in a bind many times and needed a graphic, you know, like in the next thirty minutes, and basically found a freelancer online, had them pump it out, and got exactly what I needed. You know, something that staff and or, you know, you know, local people, they just might not have time to do the job. Which brings me to another important point.

Danny Parmelee: 10:00

At the time that I left Epicos, the church that I planted in Milwaukee, we had about 20 staff members, and I still used freelancers, and encouraged our staff to use freelancers if they needed. So while we had paid people on our staff to do graphics and video, oftentimes they would even essentially subcontract that out, so that they could focus on bigger things, or they could get multiple ideas, multiple concepts from these freelancers, and then they could take those ideas and kind of bring them to completion, and make sure it had our culture, and feel, and branding to it. So to me this was just a matter of stewardship. Alright. The third one that many people don't think of, that I'm a big proponent of of the advantage is detached investment.

Danny Parmelee: 10:43

So this may be more important than you think, and I have lots of stories both personally and from other church planners I coach. Oftentimes, when church planners start out, they have a quote unquote friend or launch team member that is willing to do some graphic design for free or a reduced cost to them. Oh, the Lord provides. This is so amazing. So most church planners feel that this is God's miraculous provision for them.

Danny Parmelee: 11:09

Okay. Sometimes it is. I'll give you that. But oftentimes, it's not. Here's why.

Danny Parmelee: 11:14

Graphic designers tell me, hey, just give me some critique on my concepts. I'm very open to criticism. I won't take anything personal. And then they present some designs, and and, you know, welcome the feedback, and then you give the feedback, and then they're like, how dare you? No.

Danny Parmelee: 11:30

Don't you understand? Like, look closely. The t is actually across, and it's a perfect representation of blah blah blah blah blah. Okay. You get the idea.

Danny Parmelee: 11:39

Now you have this problem, because you have a friend, or worse yet, a team member who has given their heart and soul, invested their gift of time and design into this, and now you've hurt their feelings because you don't appreciate their art or expertise, or literally choose not to use them at all. Now, there is this awkwardness then that you end up, you kind of look like the jerk or a control freak. Have I used team members and friends to create stuff? Yes. Absolutely, I have.

Danny Parmelee: 12:09

And at times it has worked out well, and we've used their designs. Yes. It was really cool to have actual team members, you know, developing things for the church. However, I do have, again, the stories, you know, of the reverse where people get sour and they leave. With a freelancer, if they create the crappiest logo you've ever seen, there isn't any personal investment.

Danny Parmelee: 12:32

So especially for things like a logo that are long term, I suggest to hire a couple freelancers who give you a number of concepts, instead of relying on just that one friend or volunteer who's gonna give you just their style. So let me give you the basics of how to utilize a freelance website, such as Upwork. But again, I want you to head over to the blog, you will actually get to watch a video of me walking through how I how I do this. You'll see a, you know, real life example of it. And of course, you can use there's other platforms out there to hire people, you know, for an ongoing basis, but I tend to use, you know, mostly just kind of per project situations.

Danny Parmelee: 13:13

So when you start out, you'll basically post a job, you'll give it a title. So for my example that you'll see on the on the video, it's podcast cover art. That's all I call it. It will ask me the category, you know, I'll just say, hey, this is, you know, for graphic design. Then it takes me to this part where I need to kinda give a description of the deliverable.

Danny Parmelee: 13:34

So this can be casual, but should be somewhat specific. I might say something like, hey, I'm a podcaster. I need some new cover art. I'm, you know, looking for a freelancer to deliver a 3,000 by 3,000 pixel JPEG. And I would love to have three concepts, you know, with using the provided images, and here's the, you know, use the text 101 questions that church minors ask with Danny Parmelee.

Danny Parmelee: 14:00

The great thing is that as part of this selection, you can upload an image or images that you want them to use, and it's always helpful to give examples of final products. So you'll see that I do this in in my example. I personally love graphic design, like, I I I love design, but I cannot design my way out of a wet paper bag. So what I do instead is I look for these other examples, I attach the images and hey, really kind of like this style. A lot of times I will do my own mock up and just make it in, you know, Microsoft Word or PowerPoint or whatever, and it just it looks horrible, but at least they get somewhat of the general idea and direction, and then they make it look awesome.

Danny Parmelee: 14:40

So, also in the description, you can add in there if you need it ASAP, those types of things. The next part, you get to create some questions for your freelancer, because basically as you post this job, you're kinda creating an interview process where the people say, hey. So you write some some different questions. Here's kind of my standards, you know, have you viewed the files that I've sent? Because some will just apply for every job that they see on there.

Danny Parmelee: 15:06

I often ask how long will it take you to complete, because if this is something I need right away, I need to know if they're able to do it right now, or if it's gonna take them, you know, a couple days before they even start it. I always ask what programs they're gonna use. This is more important, especially when you when you get into technical projects like renderings, and video, and audio. You wanna know that they're using, you know, the highest quality stuff. I also usually end by asking them if they have any questions for me.

Danny Parmelee: 15:33

Because usually, this is a way to kinda just like in regular interview process, are they paying attention? So maybe I'll leave out, for example, what colors or fonts I want. And then if they ask the question like, yeah, what colors or fonts? It's like, oh, this person's paying attention, They're asking the right questions. Then you can select if you want only people from The United States, or if you're open to people from around the world.

Danny Parmelee: 15:56

Of course, I always choose worldwide. Next, you'll get to choose, you know, if you have a preference for a region, and this can depend on what you're doing. But I almost always just choose Europe, and it doesn't mean that only people from Europe can apply, just that, you know, Upwork will kinda send it to more of the freelancers in that area. And kind of a free tip I found is that Eastern Europe is where many of my favorite freelancers are from, and maybe even more specifically The Ukraine. Now, know it's bad to stereotype, but I've just found that my Ukrainian freelancers are the nicest, hardest working, and most delightful people.

Danny Parmelee: 16:37

I'd even consider some of them friends, and I'm not joking. One of the freelancers that I used for computer programming to do, you know, one of our web apps called Rev Coach, which by the way, if you don't know what Rev Coach is, it's one of our church planting programs, platforms that we use. Again, can find it at churchplantersask.com. It's free. And, you know, I had I I designed it, I developed it, but I know nothing about coding, so hired someone to basically code the entire concept that that I had.

Danny Parmelee: 17:08

And his name was Dimitri, and he's really become a friend of mine. So much so that he even traveled to The United States, and we met up in Chicago. He came to our church planting banquet. I showed him around the city. So it's pretty crazy to think that I hired a freelancer to create an app, a church planting app, that later became a friend of mine, and now he's done multiple projects for me, really even on an enterprise level.

Danny Parmelee: 17:35

So alright. This next part is really important. You get to set your proposed bid price based on hourly or per project. Especially if you're just starting out, I wanna highly highly suggest to choose per project. You need to think in your mind, how much time will this take to complete and how much is it worth it for you to spend.

Danny Parmelee: 17:55

So for our example, in my mind, I think that someone could complete three concepts and make some revisions, you know, within an hour, hour and a half. So I might set my proposed bid price between 10 and $15. When you're setting that price, you're really only suggesting what you kind of want to pay, and people will respond with bids both higher and lower than that. You may have a designer say, oh man, I can crank this out quickly. I can do it for $7, Or I'm, you know, I I really wanna I really want this project.

Danny Parmelee: 18:25

I'm excited about it. I'll do it for less. And then you have others who say, woah. That's a much bigger project. I'm gonna charge a lot more.

Danny Parmelee: 18:33

Now, I actually have started this project already and I saw one bid come in for a hundred and $50, which you'll see on there and I'm thinking, okay, I I said I said $12, and you said a hundred and 50. So that's the beauty of it, is that the freelancers read your project and tell you how much they are expecting to be paid. And as a side note, as you build a team of people you trust, you can switch to hourly for certain things. And this is important for ongoing work where it's, you know, not as easy to maybe set an exact price, some of the computer search engine optimization, maybe copywriting, those types of things. So one of the unique features is that, if you're paying someone on an hourly, Upwork is taking screenshots of their computer, and you can look at the logs and it'll tell you how many keystrokes and what's happening.

Danny Parmelee: 19:23

You basically are like big brother, that you can see what they're if they're actually working on your project for the hours that you're getting billed, Which yes, I've had freelancers, in the beginning that I caught that were not working on my project, and they were still charging me for that hour. They were doing their own social media stuff. So but this is why I like the per project price until you at least have a good established relationship. Alright. Then you post your project, and it's available for freelancers to bid on.

Danny Parmelee: 19:49

Now, one of the things that you can do to increase the quality of your applicants is to personally invite freelancers to bid on your projects. It's a very easy search tool. You basically can just say, hey, I'm looking for graphic designers. I'm kind of looking for this pay range. Here's kind of the places I'm looking.

Danny Parmelee: 20:05

And you can click on their profiles, and kind of see, you know, how much are they usually charging, and what are, you know, you know, see some examples of their stuff. You get to invite up to 15 freelancers, and I'd suggest use all those invites. Look at their profiles, pay attention to their pro portfolio. There's feedback from other people who have used them. Don't really look at their degree or years of experience.

Danny Parmelee: 20:28

Look at their profile. Here's why. Sometimes freelancers, you know, aren't going to fit your design style. I wanna be careful how I say this, and not to be misunderstood. But when I first started using freelancers, I would get inexpensive bids from freelancers from Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and India, who said they were experts at graphic design, they had degrees.

Danny Parmelee: 20:51

But then, when I looked at their portfolio, I could see that their design style was totally opposite of what I wanted. Now, design style may actually be culturally relevant for their country or, you know, similar countries, but it was a total mismatch for our church. Now, gave some of them a chance thinking, oh, they can adapt. They'll be able to kind of translate it, but it almost never worked out. So again, this is where I just found great graphic designers in Eastern Europe.

Danny Parmelee: 21:21

Okay. So now the fun part. Over the next few days, you have a bunch of freelancers you've invited, freelancers from all over the world just kinda see it. They answer the questions that you send, you see their profile, there may be some questions, some chats back and forth. And they might say, hey, I even, you know, did something similar.

Danny Parmelee: 21:37

Here's here's a example of that project. Some may even make a mock up concept for you, and to say, hey, I know you you wanted three concepts. Here's here's here's an example. Here's one of them. And then they'll just put a watermark on it, so you can't use it, and they'll say, hire me.

Danny Parmelee: 21:51

You know, here's your free sample. And you can again, you can chat with them. There's a chat feature. It's really great. You can do video chat.

Danny Parmelee: 21:57

You can do whatever you want, during the interview process, or once you actually hire them. Finally, you choose one of your freelancers, and here's the great part about the system, is that you use your credit card, the payment goes into escrow, so you're not paying them right away. That means that you don't really release the money to them until they're done and they've delivered the project. If they ghost you, or they just do a horrible job, you'll get your money back. Okay?

Danny Parmelee: 22:23

On the other hand, if they do their job, then you end the job, you click release payment, they're paid, there's no paperwork, you don't have to fill out any $10.99 forms. It's really, really beautiful. What will happen is over time, you will find a team of freelancers for different types of jobs. As I mentioned before, I have kind of my go to people now. And from time to time, I'll explore new freelancers.

Danny Parmelee: 22:46

And sometimes I get freelancers, you know, that, you know, they're just starting out, so I can afford them. They have a low bid price. They're kind of just breaking into the market, and then over time, they get so good I can't afford them anymore. And it sucks, but I'm also really really happy for them, because it is really neat to just see someone grow over time, and pretty soon that they're so busy, they've got other big clients, they can get more money, and so it's just kind of a neat thing that way. So don't think that your church plant team is limited to those just in your city.

Danny Parmelee: 23:17

God can do some amazing things in this global world in which we live. Again, if you wanna see it on screen, how I actually post a job for the new podcast cover art, head over to churchplantersask.com. You can watch the video there. Also, if you have a question about church planting, or a follow-up question about freelancers or you want the names of some of my best freelancers, just send me a message. I'd be glad to help.

Danny Parmelee: 23:46

Remember, keep asking those questions.