We’ve been using churchscheduling.com for a little over a year now and are very happy with it. Before switching to it we passed around a sign up sheet to get volunteers for each upcoming month. There were a couple of problems with this set up:

1) People who weren’t at church when we passed the signup sheet around couldn’t sign up.

2) most people didn’t now their schedule a month ahead of time so even though they were more than happy to volunteer they wouldn’t sign up.

This meant I would have to spend a fair amount of time on Saturday texting and calling people to try and fill empty slots and confirming with people who had already signed up.

Churchscheduling automated all of that process. I don’t have to spend part of my Saturday afternoon doing it. A side benefit is the fact that because it’s a computer asking people, they feel less obligated to say yes. So they are overall more happy about volunteering, I think.

The only problem we’ve had with the system is that because it works so automatically most of the time, when someone doesn’t confirm or deny an assignment, they can slip through the cracks and a position is shorthanded. I have a couple of guys who, even with two reminders, sometimes don’t confirm. They just don’t know if they’ll be in town until the night before or the texts get them at bad times and they forget to respond. It would be nice if the system would send me a message a certain number of hours ahead of time with a list of people who have not confirmed. This way I could check with them individually and get them to confirm or just switch them with someone.

I would absolutely recommend this app to other churches. It’s pretty straightforward to set up. And Edward is super helpful if you get stuck. It has made our volunteering process work much more smoothly.