The first thing you notice about OnlineRostering.com (OR) is that the font size is very small. When it’s difficult to view a website, this isn’t a good start!

However, the functionality of OR is promising – check out the list of features on the OR website. The process within OR in a nutshell is:

• create services (e.g. Sunday at 9.45am),
• create teams (e.g. worship leaders),
• allocate teams to services,
• create positions within teams (e.g. female worship leader),
• add team members (people) to teams,
• assign these people to positions within the teams,
• roster the teams of people to serve at particular dates,
• activate the roster.

It sounds a bit complex, doesn’t it? However, to give it the benefit of the doubt, all new processes take time to learn, and I’ve only spent a short amount of time looking around.

Some of the benefits of this system include:

• people can log-in and see when they’re rostered on to serve,
• reminders can be automatically sent out,
• people can indicate when they’re unavailable to serve and this is made clear within the system (i.e. avoid confusion and complex note-taking),
• you can assign leaders of teams to manage their own teams (if you so desire).

In terms of pricing, for a church of 250, the cost would be $112.50 per month. See a full list of the pricing structure.

You can access a demo, and check it out for yourself.

My verdict (after admittedly a relatively short trial) is that OR includes some very useful functionality, that might be a tad complex for my church to administer – though for larger churches and those with complex structures, the administrative savings in this set-up could make it worthwhile. Also, the font small enough to make it difficult to use on a regular basis. Font size is a small issue, but for regular use, it would become tiresome. Clearly, a lot of work has gone into this program, and the developers have done a great job. Thanks for your service of the kingdom in producing this application!

Time for some feedback – have you used it? What do you think? Try out the demo and share your feedback!

I’ve been doing some thinking about rosters in an effort to assist the people at my church who work with them, as well as those who receive them!

While I’ve started looking at some tools (see 16 tools to build services and assist church musicians), the step before that and the one I’m keen to hear about today is one of processes.

At my church the basic rostering process goes something like this:

1. our administrator sends out a mega roster with the proposed roster for each service for the next three months. This includes all your regular church gathering activities – musicians, Bible readers, welcomers, prayers, service leaders etc.
2. people can respond to this mega roster, and indicate weeks that they will be unavailable to serve.
3. an update roster mega roster is distributed, and if you are unable to serve on a particular week, it’s up to you to arrange a swap.
4. each week, a reminder is sent out to the people on the roster for that week, including details of the structure of the service. The service leader might also phone the people serving.

This is a rough outline – it doesn’t always work like this, and different services operate in slightly different ways.

I’m keen to hear how your church does it, and what you think works well and not so well about the current processes.

Also, does your church post its rosters on the church website?