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.
Posted in: Software for Scheduling Church Volunteers
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.