Sometimes your volunteers just can’t make a service you’re rostered for. That normally means a lot more work for you. Elvanto empowers your volunteers to swap with someone, or have themselves replaced.
Swaps
Swapping with someone is exactly as it sounds: someone asks another rostered volunteer to do their turn, in exchange for returning the favour at a later date. Swaps will only succeed if the volunteer accepts the unavailable person’s request.
Replacement
Replacing is similar, but when they ask someone else to take their turn, they’re not promising to return the favour. ‘Replace’ looks at replacing the unavailable person with another volunteer who is not rostered but is eligible to be rostered in that position. For both swapping and replacing, anyone can send requests to as many people as possible at once.
Unsuccessful requests
If a request is unsuccessful, the person making the request will be sent an email. A request will be unsuccessful if all people decline, or if the request runs out of time.
Setting the boundaries
In order to avoid chaos, Swap & Replace is best managed within limits that you can change. To update the restrictions of Swap & Replace, go to Settings > Services > Roster.
Prevention and Cancellation
Because sudden changes to your volunteers on the day can be a little chaotic, use Prevention and/or Cancellation to limit how soon changes can be made. The prevention setting stops volunteers from making any requests: if they try to swap or be replaced within this time period, they will automatically fail their request. Cancellation stops any pending requests at a point so many hours/days before service.
For example, if your church has prevention set to 48 hours before a service, and cancellation set to 24 hours, someone wanting to be replaced a week in advance may not find a replacement until the day before the service, but that replacement would succeed, as long as it was not within 24 hours of the service. But a person attempting to swap the day before service would not be able to.
Note that these settings are for your whole church, and cannot (yet) be adjusted for different Service Types.
Department-wide settings
Department settings allow you to turn on/off Swap, Replace, or both for any department.