A Schedules Module Overview

Schedules have been one of our most popular features.  The Church Social Schedules Module allows your congregation to manage schedules for all kinds of events and purposes. This includes special visit schedules, usher lists, host family schedules, nursery schedules, serving elder schedules, deacon collection schedules, sound committee schedules, bible study meeting schedules, and more.

Schedule Entries

Schedules consist of schedule entries. Each entry represents a task for someone (or some people) on a specific date. Entries can be added for single members, families, and entire groups. For example, you would add a single member to a nursery schedule, you would add a family to a host family schedule, and you would add a group to a bible study meeting schedule.

All schedule entries can have an optional description. This is helpful for providing some extra information about that task. For example, a nursery schedule entry may indicate which room they are in (infants, toddlers). A deacon collection schedule description may indicate which service (morning or afternoon) the brother has to collect for. Multiple schedule entries can be added for a single day.

Schedule Notifications - Email

One of the great features of the schedules is the reminder notifications.  Members often have many things going on in their lives and the schedule notifications are very helpful. 

• Schedules can have email reminders sent to the members 0 to 14 days prior to the task date. If the date is Sunday, and the reminder is set to "1 day prior", the member will get the notification on Saturday at 5am.  Reminders can also be configured to arrive the same day as the event.
• It's possible to have up to two reminders go out for a single task. For example, for a host family schedule you may want to send a notification out on the Monday (6 days prior) so that the family can prepare, with a second notification going out on the Saturday (1 day prior) as an extra reminder.
• All notifications are sent at 5am, in the congregation's timezone.
• The schedules allow email notifications to be sent to parents which is helpful for example for a nursery schedule that includes younger members of the congregation who may not have email addresses configured in Church Social. When this feature is enabled for a schedule, if a child is scheduled, Church Social will send a reminder email to the parents of any children.  There is no age limit for the notification since generally if the child is older and has done profession of faith, the practice is to move the child to their own family in Church Social.  This means that once the child has done profession of faith, the child's parents will no longer receive email notifications. 
• Optional schedule descriptions are shown in the app and are also included in the reminder emails.

Calendar

The Church Social Calendar will show in orange all schedules for a member.  This allows members to quickly and easily see when they are scheduled for any events.

Schedule Administrators

When you create a schedule, you become the administrator of that schedule. Only you are allowed to edit that schedule. You can easily change the administrator and add up to 9 additional administrators as required.