If you've ever done it or had a spouse who has done it, you know that scheduling volunteers to serve on a consistent basis on Sundays is a complex and often grueling task. It can often mean Saturday night or even Sunday morning phone calls from someone you were counting on who needs to back out. And you have to find a replacement. This is stressful for everyone involved.
Over the years some of these family members, those with a geek streak, knew there had to be a better way. And volunteer scheduling software was born. This was one of the factors that led to our development of this feature as well.
Specifically, here are some of the problems our volunteer scheduling feature addresses:
- Identify serving roles that need to be filled and when.
- Identify who is available to fill these roles.
- Notify when a volunteer is double-booked.
- Offer people the option to accept or decline when to serve.
- Let people block out dates they can't serve.
- Let (or require) volunteers to get their own substitutes.
- Send out reminders.
- Do all of these with many different teams serving at the same time.
- Duplicate or re-use previous schedules for future serving times.
Like most of our features, the development of Service Volunteers came in waves. We released a version, learned from it, learned from others, and released another version. This is how software development works.
To learn more, check out my release notes from six months ago - New! Service Volunteers. Top tier upgrade.
For details on using it, check out this Knowledge Base article - How do I setup a Volunteer Schedule.
One of the exciting benefits of mastering volunteer scheduling is that with it pastors, staff, and volunteers responsible for scheduling volunteers experience less stress and best of all - they get their Saturday nights back.
