Have you had that dream in the
middle of the night that you completely missed a class, test, game, work
assignment or something really important? That's what Saturday nights are
for church staff responsible for staffing dozens and sometimes hundreds of
volunteers every Sunday. It can be a nightmare.
First of all, you have to recruit
all these volunteers. How do you do that? Obviously, you do
announcements but seldom does that come anywhere near doing the trick
especially for children's ministry in a young, growing church. Then once
you get their names, do you email, text or call them? If they want time to
think about it, how do your remember when to call them? What about people who
don't call back? Great news, friends,
church software can help you
with all of this. The system works like a combination of marketing software to
manage email/text communication and sales software to coordinate personal calls
and follow up assignments.
Once volunteers are recruited they
are put into teams corresponding to their task assignments, frequency of
service, time of service or a combination of these. These teams are the
hub from which the scheduling, reminder and weekly management of the team is
managed. The pioneers of volunteer scheduling software focused on
building software just for this purpose. But now there is Church
Management Software like Churchteams that integrates these features with the
full application. This allows you to keep all your people data in one
place rather than having to keep multiple databases synched. It also makes the
transition from recruiting to scheduling a breeze.
The scheduling part of the software
is flexible to use anyway you want. If you want to schedule all the ushers
for first and third Sundays for the next 4 months, no problem. Just
select the dates, then select the people and send an invitation for them to
accept or decline the assignment. If they know they are supposed to serve
then don't bother with the email asking for an RSVP, just build the
schedule. The advantage of the RSVP is that it gives the team leader
notice to extend an invitation to substitutes. These may include people
serving on other, related teams. You can assign roles or let people
select the role they want to take on the team.
Once scheduled, you can customize
the days you want reminders sent to those who have accepted the opportunity or
been assigned to serve. You might choose for instance to send a first
reminder 6 days or more out from the service date. This reminder has a
link that allows the person to go back in and change their status if something
came up. This notifies the team leader well ahead of time of the need for
a substitute. Then schedule the second reminder just a day or two before the
actual service date. The great thing about the reminders is that once you
set them up, they just work. You don't have to do another thing.
So, if you schedule a team for 4 months out. Every week the system pushes
out the reminders for you as the team leader and all you have to do is respond
to notifications sent to you if people change their status from accept to
decline.
Need a report each week to see the
list of people scheduled to serve? No problem, just print the volunteer
schedule for that Sunday. It will show you all the people by team.
If you want to add in contact information just in case, you have the option to
do that. In fact, print out this report the Friday before and keep it handy as
an assurance that everything is set for Sunday.
The great thing about nightmares is
that they are just dreams that you eventually wake up from. Then once you
are awake again you remember that you graduated from high school or college
years ago; or your playing career ended long ago or that work assignment is
completed. For volunteer scheduling, church management software like
Churchteams can be your assurance that everything is okay and ready for
Sunday. So, fall back to sleep and rest well.
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