Our church used to do something similar (except there was no draft. you just had to let the person who made the roster know if you were going to be away).

In the last several years, we changed though. We now put out a blank sign up sheet with slots for everything that needs done. Each quarter.

The reason for the switch is that we wanted people to serve if and when they had a heart to serve, not merely because they are on the list and can’t get off it without an awkward conversation.

We’ve found this system to work quite well so far.

This issue is a nightmare at our church (1000+ members, 10 congregations, most functioning as separate churches).
We badly, badly need a system to minimise the admin overhead, and that automatically texts and/or emails reminders every week.
I know there are online systems that can do that, but they seem hugely complex to set up and fairly pricey to subscribe to. Would love to know of any open source solutions…

One of the many people in our roster production chain recently informed me that part of the process was to fax rosters to someone else in the chain. *Fax*!!

I want a solution that provides a simple interface for subscribers to create (optionally complex) availability rules. Preferably a SaaS solution. Is such a solution available?

For our university church (UNSW) we have 3 teams who are on for 2 weeks (then off for 4). These teams cover music, tech, welcoming, picking up all the gear and taking it back, locking everything up, counting the money and most things. This has worked really well as people know exactly how much they will be doing when they sign up, people aren’t burnt out, but they are trained up well and also get o know their team well. (We’re a church who are aiming to train and send people.) I know other non-university churches do a similar thing but their teams go for a month.

Bible reading and praying is managed by whoever leads the service each week. We’ve started using Planning Center Online to manage everything (rosters, run sheets, songs and CCLI etc) which is working reasonably well, though it’s still early days.

For those wanting a software solution, let me reiterate, try Planning Center Online. It’s free to set up a small trial account, and we’ve been finding it quite good and I know other churches that love it, although it’s not free, and does take a bit to get set it up really well.

Steve, our process is much the same as yours and we don’t use anything fancy to automate scheduling or reminders. At the moment we find that’s working fine, but I’m going to have a look at a few of these tools for future reference.

Pastoral Care http://www.pastoralcare.com.au has roster module tied to member database which is well worth the initial set up and learning curve. Exports in multiple formats, direct email from roster module, manages multiple services.

We roster 3 months ahead. People email they’re unavailable dates which are entered into Pastoral Care, as are rules about compatible/incompatible duties. The program monitors this information and prevents mistakes.

We publish roster to password protected page and it is used frequently. It is not public due to security/privacy concerns. .

As the person who is currently managing rosters at our church (see Nate Swift comment above). Further to Nate’s comment I have tended to work out a small rotation for myself to try and manage people’s loads.

Interesting that the blank paper is working for you Jason. We tried that and it wasn’t so successful. I guess it just goes to show how you have to find what works for your church.

I’m also curious to know how people follow up on rosters and make sure that people will do what they are down to do. i can see from the posts to date that many use e-mail, phone, text etc. What works for you?

Ditto to Boyto. This is similar to a system at my last church. One of the best and easily managed ways to do it.

Late entry…

We use an add-on for the Jethro pastoral ministry manager below. (It’s still in beta, only available via CVS on sourceforge, should have been released properly ages ago, blah blah blah!).

It’s pretty simple, just supporting a human process rather than trying to replace a human.

We define roles for each congregation, and “roster views” that are a collection of roles. Each role is linked to a group of people who have volunteered for the role. Using one roster view at a time (eg all preachers, then all preachers and service leaders, then all the morning service personnel etc), we manually allocate people to roles on dates, by choosing volunteers from drop-down lists. Then we email out the result – because it’s hooked into our contact/pastoral database, it quickly gives us a link to email all the people on the roster.

We have an extra role called “unavailable” and when someone indicates they’re unavailable for a date we allocate them to that role, so the system warns us if we try to allocate them to something else on that date. For certain key groups (musicians, morning tea team leaders etc) I ask in advance if there are dates they’re unavailable. For others that are more easily swapped (eg Bible reading) it’s a “let me know if you can’t do it” situation. (Or actually a “please arrange a swap if you can, and tell me” situation).

Because it’s a web app, our public website can pull the roster content through so people can see it – that’s pretty important, because having multiple versions of doc or xls documents flying around by email is terrible.

I’ve looked at planning centre online and it’s good. But I think its geared for a slightly more week-by-week model, rather than doing a month or two of rosters at a time. Its benefit is its powerful service planning features. The benefit of our system is its direct link to our contacts/pastoral database.

This sounds great Tom, and something we’d like to try out as we think about improving rosters at church.

How easy is it to set-up (realising it’s still in beta)?