Case Study: Managing special services

Introduction

There are certain times of the year when many churches hold special services in addition to their usual Sunday services - at Christmas and Easter, for example. We're often asked about how we'd recommend managing rotas for these services.

There are two approaches you could take to managing these special services - we'll take a look at both in a moment - but the first thing to do is ensure you have a Service set up for your special services. Our related Support Article, Assigning rotas to services, covers this in more detail.

To create a new service, if you don't already have one, head to the Rotas module and click Services, then click Add service:

Add a name for your service, such as "Special Services" and click Save.

1. Use your existing Ministries

This method means that you can use all of the ministries you already have set up for your Sunday Services but use them to create additional rotas for your special services. To do this, head to the first ministry you want to create a new rota for and click Add rota:

Name the rota accordingly - in this example, we're having a Christmas Day service:

Select your "Special Services" service:

Choose the right date, day(s) and times for your service:

You may wish to set the team rotation for your special service rotas to AdHoc, if they're not going to follow a rotation pattern, but this is optional. You can find more information about Team Rotations in our related Support Article, How to add a ministry. If your rota covers a single date, the repeat rota option can left at the default setting:

Review your other rota settings, selecting or deselecting options as necessary, then click Save:

You've now created a rota for the first of your special services, for this ministry.

If you have multiple special services, on multiple dates, you can use the Add button to add additional special service dates to your rota:

You will now need to add people to the rota.

If you use rota reminder emails or SMS, you'll need to edit the content of these to communicate information specific to your special services. There's more about how to do this in our related Support Article, Sending rota reminders.

Repeat the above steps for other relevant ministries and don't forget to Publish your rotas once you're happy with them!

2. Create new Ministries

The second method for managing your special service rotas is to create dedicated ministries for "Special Services", which you can use each year for managing your additional services. This could mean creating one Ministry, called "Special Services" with multiple roles - ideal if your special services tend to be smaller, with less roles to fill than a normal service. Our related Support Article, How to add a ministry, tells you how to do this.

Alternatively, you may choose to Duplicate your existing ministries, editing the ministry name, serves day(s), times, rotation and repeat.

When duplicating a ministry, you can choose to retain the existing teams, members, overseers and reminders, if you'd like, or you can choose not to duplicate them and set them up from scratch.

Once you've created your new special service ministries, you can add rotas for each of them for the dates of your special services, ensuring that you assign them to the "Special Services" service.

Planning

You might also wish to create a template Plan for your special services and link any plans to your "Special Service" service, helping to your plan your extra services too!