This update is for your hard-working volunteers, and the schedule organizers who love (and schedule) them. As of Wednesday, February 22, your volunteers will have the ability to choose their own serving opportunities. Here are a couple of elemental changes that paved the way.
Simplify Your Decisions
We changed up the Send Requests modal. If you recall, we used to give you the option to send requests out for “Selected Weeks” or “All Weeks”.
We removed that option, so the modal now only applies to the weeks you’re viewing in the Grid. This means one less step to send out requests to your volunteers. We also cleaned up the language in this modal so it is more clear. We used to call new requests “Not yet sent requests”. Now, we are simply calling them “new requests”.
Empower Your Volunteers
The new third option, "Open unassigned positions for volunteers to sign up", is where things really start to get interesting.
Schedule Organizers, we know you probably have a pool of great volunteers eager to help wherever they can. They’d love to just sign up for whenever they’re available, without having to wait for you to comb through all of their serving preferences to place them into a slot. When you select this new option, any position slots that are not full on the Grid will be made ‘Open’, allowing volunteers to select the weeks and service times they would like to serve. Like the request emails, this will apply to all of the weeks you are currently viewing on the Grid.
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Volunteers, if you are a part of a position that has an ‘Open’ slot, you will receive an email letting you know that position slot is open. Your schedule pages (logged out and logged in) now have an ‘Open’ tab next to ‘Schedule’ and ‘Request’.
Here, you’ll find all of the serving opportunities that you are able to schedule yourself for. Clicking ‘Sign up’ adds you to that position slot on the schedule with a status of ‘Accepted’. And remember, that logged out schedule page works great on a phone, so you can sign up with the quick swipe of your finger, without ever having to log in to the software. It’s that easy.
Know the State of Your Schedule
Organizing a schedule can be a complex process with lots of moving pieces. Life happens and sometimes people have to change their schedules or availability. With this update, 3 days before a service, we will check to make sure you have ‘Accepted’ volunteers in every needed position. If you don’t, we’ll send you an email letting you know you still have some spots to fill.
So if you sent out all of your requests and someone hasn’t responded yet, 3 days before the service, you’ll get an email so you can follow up with that pending volunteer. Or, if you ‘Open’ your positions and they don’t all get filled, we’ll send you an email so you can go fill the rest of your schedule. No more surprises on Sunday morning.
We hope you are and your volunteers are feeling the love with this Scheduling update. Here’s to better volunteer engagement and less stress for your Schedule Organizers!