Getting started with the Rotas module

Introduction to the Rotas module

Welcome to the ChurchSuite Rotas module! This module enables churches and other organisations to manage ministries and teams, serving volunteers and roles, producing rotas and sending automated reminders.

If you're new to the Rotas module, we'd encourage you to read this article in full to familiarise yourself with the module's key features and customisation options available, and to acquaint yourself with some of the basic concepts and terminology you'll see within the module and our other Rotas module support articles.

Next Steps

Terminology

Here's a list of terms you may see across the ChurchSuite modules and in our support articles:

• Ministries refer to your various areas of serving in your organisation, including both your Sunday ministries and mid-week ministries. Ministries can be organised into teams, with roles optionally assigned to ministry members. Rotas can then be produced for each ministry, with automatic, timely serving reminders sent to rota members. You need to set up ministries in order to be able to create rotas.
• Ministry Overseers are contacts who have oversight or management of a ministry. They can be notified of unavailability or clashes on published rotas, as well as managing their ministry and rotas within My ChurchSuite.
• Roles are the specific jobs/responsibilities that each person would be scheduled to fulfil on a specific date.
• Rotas are created from Ministries and allow you to organise serving dates, people and roles.
• Rota Reminders are automatic reminders by Email or SMS that you can set up so that people are reminded when they are due to serve on a rota.
• Services group together all the related rotas for each of your services, making it easier to visualise who is serving across a service, identify any gaps, add service notes that will appear on each linked rota and communicate with everyone involved.
• Unavailability can be added by ministry members, ministry overseers and module users for individual dates, part-days or a range of dates. Unavailability helps you to know who isn't available to serve on specific dates.

The module features at a glance

• Create ministries and optionally add teams
• Assign contacts and children to one or more teams in a ministry and assign roles
• Assign ministry overseers who can then manage teams and rotas from within the member-facing My ChurchSuite without needing user access to the Rotas module
• Produce ad hoc and team rotation rotas
• Publish and send rotas to rota members
• Send automated rota-serving reminders by email and SMS
• Invite ministry members to sign up for available rota dates where there is sign-up capacity remaining
• Track people's serving request response status using rota accept/decline
• In-built clash detection alerts you to clashes as you add people to rota dates
• Rota members can block out unavailability dates and date ranges
• Rota members can organise and process swaps, with overseer notifications and rota member confirmations
• Group rotas together into your various services and visualise all the rotas for a service in the service view
• Link rotas to service plans so that as rotas change, the people associated with service plan items remain up to date
• Visualise and manage multiple rotas in a powerful overview
• Add notes to rotas and services - ideal for noting a guest speaker, special service, service themes and readings
• Receive rota expiry reminders letting overseers know when a rota is coming to an end
• Easily produce follow-on rotas or extend existing ones
• Comprehensive rota communication functionality enables you to stay in touch with ministry members, rota members and overseers
• Rotas members can visualise and manage all their upcoming serving commitments in the member-facing My ChurchSuite. They can also block out unavailability, organise and process swaps, communicate with their fellow rota members, accept and decline serving requests, and even sign up for a signup-enabled rota where there are gaps you need to fill
• Wide range of serving-related reports designed to help you better understand the serving frequency and personal serving statistics of your volunteers - easily identify those at risk of serving fatigue, those who may be open to a further increase in their serving capacity and those who are not currently serving

Got a question?

You’ll find the answers to most questions in our support articles - they're all available through the Support beacon in the bottom-right corner of each page in the Rotas module - search by topic, phrase or keyword. You can also access the Support Article library on our website. And if you still can't find something you're looking for, click to get in touch with one of the ChurchSuite team - we’re happy to help!