Churches depend so much on volunteers, and in such a variety of roles, that it's difficult to effectively coordinate everything manually. Is your church using volunteer management/scheduling software? If so, please share some info about your experience.
A few of the key software features we are looking for are:
- Individuals are not scheduled for multiple volunteer duties at the same time (not on nursery duty during same service as in Praise Team)
- Ability to send email or text reminder
- Reminder notice when current background check is expiring
Comments
I have been thinking about this for a while. My church seems to use multiple spread sheets maintained by multiple people, which is not the best way to do things. If nothing satisfactory is suggested, I believe that I could make a web based system that would include your key features and more. If any one is interested in this idea let me know what you would want in such a system. Gary
I currently schedule our volunteers through an excel spreadsheet 4 months at a time. It can be very time consuming figuring out the scheduling...and making sure people aren't scheduled for multiple things at once. I would really like to hear how other churches handle this as well.
We Use Ministry Scheduler Pro. It costs a bit. but it does everything you're asking for. And not only that, but your ministry leaders can make their own schedules based on the the availability of each individual in the congregation. here's the link:
https://www.ministryschedulerpro.com/
There is an app too that works well for the congregation
We use Worship Planning. The volunteers can update the calendar to block out dates they aren't available. The scheduler can send both an email and text to the volunteer to book a specific task which can be accepted or declined. You can also see who else is scheduled for the service. A reminder is also sent by text and email prior to the date scheduled. I find it easy to use.
It's quite affordable.
We can use it for different events and not just worship service.
https://worshipplanning.com/
Our church has used a variety of different tools for scheduling. For several years, we used Excel spreadsheets for worship but moved to Planning Center Online about 6 years ago. Planning Center allows us to have all worship information in one location...service orders, song tracking, volunteer schedules.
For nursery, greeters, ushers, coffee serving, etc. we utilized a program called SmartRoster. It worked well for us for several years and even had an auto-schedule feature that would fill in our volunteer slots based on preferences of each person (like frequency of serving, serving on the same or opposite Sundays of spouses, etc). SmartRoster was a great solution until we decided to move everything to one platform to cut down on the inadvertant scheduling of people for multiple areas on the same Sunday.
We now schedule everyone in Planning Center, which has eliminated the possibility of duplicating someone in multiple roles on the same Sunday and overall has worked very well for us.
We are in the very beginning stages of looking into switching our scheduling over to our online database system - Church Community Builder. They have recently released an update to their scheduling that makes it much more robust than it used to be. This would give us a one platform solution for all database, scheduling, giving, etc.
Hi Shari, I would appreciate hearing more about your church's experiences with Planning Center (PC) and Church Community Builder (CCB). Doesn't PC offer a comprehensive set of integrated tools? Are there specific reasons it was decided to go with CCB? Are there specific functionality that CCB offers that isn't found in PC?
We currently use a number of tools, Power Church for membership, Planning Center for worship planning and children's ministry check-in, Instant Church Directory for online and printed directory, and Vanco for online giving. Primarily because we're very disappointed with the reporting capabilities of Power Church, we're beginning a process to investigate and choose a comprehensive system.
If you would prefer to email, my address is [email protected]
Thanks!
Bob Swanson, Council President
Community CRC
Demotte, Indiana
Excellent question, Bob. Mind if I post this as a new Q&A to give it more visibility? I think that will help get you some quick and helpful responses.
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