You will need the Full Write Service Plans permission or be a group admin for a team that can be scheduled on a service plan. Group admins can only perform the actions described in this article to their teams and not others where they are not an admin in. Users with Full Write Service Plans permission can perform these actions on any team in the plan.
Once finished assigning volunteers to all needed positions, serving requests can be sent out that would allow volunteers to be notified they are assigned to serve, as well as to respond to each assignment (i.e. accept, decline, and others).
To send a request to serve in One Church Software, navigate to "Send Email," located next to "Scheduled Actions." From there, the time of the service plan would be selected, along with the appropriate statuses and serving teams. After making the selections, click Next to continue. Recipients can then be reviewed and managed by adding individuals as needed and viewing anyone who has been excluded. The request may be sent as either an email or a text message, and the option can be switched as needed. An email or text messaging template can be selected, including scheduling templates if applicable. Once everything has been reviewed and is ready, click the blue Send button to send or schedule the request.
If text messaging is enabled on the account, you can also indicate whether you also want to send a text message (assuming the volunteer has a mobile number on their profile).
Important: a login is not needed to respond to serving requests. They can do this entirely without access to One Church. However, having a login will allow them to view the associated service plan.
Once the requests get sent out, volunteers with a "Not Contacted" status will be changed to have a "Pending" status instead which indicates they were notified.
Important: volunteers who have a Pending or Accepted status will be granted read-only access to the service plan. This means they will not only be able to see the order of service (if any) but also who else is scheduled on that plan (pending and accepted assignments only).
Tip: To send serving requests to volunteers from multiple service plans, load the plans in the multi-plan grid and then go to Grid Actions > Send requests in the upper left.
Responding to a request
Regardless of whether the volunteer gets the request via email or text message, the message will include a link to where they can respond to each individual assignment. Below is an example of how a request may appear as an email.
Clicking on the Respond button will take them to a page where they can review each assignment and respond to each one. The "view plan" link will let them access the associated service plan where that assignment can be found.
The following responses can be chosen in the dropdown for each assignment:
Accept - the volunteer accepts the assignment and plans to serve
Find Replacement - the volunteer cannot make it but would like to find someone else to take their place. See this article for more details.
Swap with Another - the volunteer cannot make it but would like to switch places with another volunteer scheduled on a different day. See this article for more details.
Decline - the volunteer is unable to serve. They will be able to include an optional comment if they wish to share more details on why they are unable to make it
Response Notifications
Whenever a volunteer responds to a serving request, the group admin on that team is notified via email. Quickly see who the team admins are when viewing the serving schedule on a service plan. Click on the group name in the "Serving" area of a service plan and a side-menu will display with the names.
To add/edit team admins, select "Go to Group" and go to the "Members" tab of the group. Then toggle the "Admin?" field to Yes. Admins are listed at the top of the "Members" tab.
Important: if a team has no admins, no one is notified when a volunteer responds to a request.
Note:
A serving reminder will be sent if an individual has accepted an assignment. If they have pending status they will be sent a response reminder. Assignments with a "not contacted" status never get any automatic communication.