The services module comes with the ability to automatically schedule volunteers to services, either individually or to multiple services using the ‘Edit Multiple Services’ page. It determines who hasn’t been scheduled recently, takes into account what locations, department or service types the volunteer are assigned to, and also checks for service conflicts and volunteer unavailabilities.
Before you auto-schedule your volunteers
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Clean up out-of-date volunteers from departments ensure the list of volunteers in your departments is up to date. If people are no longer serving in those positions, make sure you have unassigned these departments from them, otherwise the system will roster them onto positions they are no longer serving in. Read this article for more information about viewing a list of volunteers, and read this article for more information about assigning positions to a volunteer.
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Assigning people to locationsIf your church has different campuses, ensure that your volunteers have their locations correctly set in their profiles. This ensures that people aren’t being rostered onto services at locations they don’t serve at or attend. If your church is a single location church, than you don’t need to worry about this. Read this article for more information on setting your locations up.
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Assigning Departments to Service TypesWhen you create a service type, you can specify which departments are required for the different services. For example, a Friday Night service aimed at Young Adults may not require volunteers too look after children, where as service for young families would. Read this article for more information on adding departments to service types.
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Assigning people to Service TypesAssigning service types to individuals ensures that they are only being rostered onto the correct services, for example you don’t want people that only attend the 9am service to be rostered onto the 6pm service. Read this article for more information about assigning volunteers to a service type.
How it Works
The Auto-schedule tool rosters people on as follows.
By default, the auto-scheduler picks people assigned to the location and service type of the service it’s rostering on. If you uncheck the locations or service type boxes then it will pull people from any location or service type.
Auto-scheduling Volunteers for individual services
Tithely Tip
Auto-Scheduling Notifications: When you auto-schedule a volunteer, the system does not automatically send a notification to the volunteer, even if their settings are configured to receive notifications at the time of scheduling. To notify volunteers about their new assignments, you will need to manually click the "Contact Volunteers" button in the service to ensure they are informed of their schedule.This offers more control as to what locations and service types you would like to roster from.Simply view the service you are wanting to schedule volunteers onto, go to the ‘Volunteers’ tab and press the ‘Auto’ button.
This will bring up a modal where you can specify which departments you want to schedule for, and what locations and service types you want to choose the volunteers from. This defaults to the location and service type of the service you are scheduling for. You can only utilize the auto schedule feature once per service.
Auto-scheduling Volunteers for Multiple Services
To use the auto-scheduler for multiple services, simply select the services you wish to roster people onto, and select the ‘Edit Multiple Services’ option. Once the ‘Edit Multiple Services’ window has loaded you can then press the ‘Auto-schedule’ button.
This will bring up the following modal. Here you can choose the departments you wish to roster people on for, and if you want them to be rostered only onto the locations and/or service types they have been assigned to, or if they can be rostered onto other services.