Elvanto has a variety of ways to schedule your volunteers on to your services. Let’s have a look at which one is best for your church!
Scheduling Individuals
Scheduling individuals is the simplest way to schedule volunteers on to services. You can go through services one at a time, or select multiple services on the ‘Services’ page to edit them together. If you choose to edit a large number of services at once, be careful to ensure that you don’t accidentally miss something while scrolling!
To see how to schedule individual volunteers onto a service, look at this link.
To see how to edit multiple services together, look at this link.
Scheduling Teams
Scheduling Teams is an optional feature, and is exactly what it sounds like. Service teams requires some initial setup, but can be changed for each individual service if someone is unavailable.
Scheduling teams is the best way to schedule volunteers if your church has established teams of volunteers serving together. For example, if you always have the same five people in the sound booth every week (good sound guys are hard to find!) then make them a team and save yourself the hassle of scheduling five people on every week.
To see how to set up a team, have a look at this link.
To see how to schedule teams on to a service, have a look at this link.
Auto-scheduling
Auto-scheduling automatically schedules on the person who hasn’t served in that position for the longest time (if they’re available). For Auto-scheduling to work at its best, you’ll need to have every volunteer’s unavailability before you assign the positions.
Auto-scheduling is a great tool for churches who might not have volunteers dedicated to scheduling. Auto-scheduling is also very useful for churches with smaller Creative Ministries departments.
That said, there’s a number of circumstances where we recommend using manual scheduling instead of Auto-scheduling. For example, a Creative Ministries department where a few couples can only volunteer if someone is free to mind the children. Auto-scheduling can’t keep track of these relationships, so it’s best to manually schedule to account for these relationships.
To see how to use Auto-scheduling, have a look at this link.
Finding the right mix
Sound like your church might need a mix of these solutions? That’s okay; you can use different scheduling methods for different departments and sub-departments.
Volunteer Unavailability
Everyone needs to take a break at some point. It’s just annoying when your entire Creative Ministries department decides that that point is next Sunday. Prepare for these Sundays by using Unavailability well.
Volunteers can access and upload their own unavailability in the Member Area, but you can also view and edit anyone’s unavailability through People > Volunteers. By regularly checking unavailability, you can see when you may need to plan something different for a service, or ask one of your neighboring churches to borrow some talent.
Also, if all of your volunteers give a reason for their unavailability, you can see which ones to contact first if you’re really down on numbers, and you can support anyone in your team going through a particularly tough time.
To see how to register your volunteer’s unavailability, visit this page.