A Volunteer Scheduling Example
A Delightful Labor user is responsible for scheduling the volunteers that help at her church. She needs to schedule greeters, readers, alter servers, sacristans, and ecumenical ministers for a Saturday evening service and several Sunday services.
Let's go through the process of setting up the volunteers for the Saturday evening service for the month of January, 2013. The first step is to create a new event:
We give our event a name - notice that we name it by the year and month so that when the events are sorted by name, it will be easy to tell what month they represent. Since we will be scheduling our volunteers for all the Saturday evening services, we use the recurring options to speed the process along.
Under the recurring options, we set the total recurrences to four (four Saturdays in January 2013), and request weekly recurrences on Saturdays. We then save the event.
We see our new event record and see the event dates corresponding to each Saturday in January, 2013.
Next let's set up the shifts and volunteers for the first Saturday:
Initially there are no shifts scheduled for this date. We click the link to add a new shift:
Let's start with the Alter Servers. We'll need three servers, and they need to be at the church by 4:45 PM.
We continue the process for the other shifts:
We now have all the shifts created for our first Saturday church service:
Now we will add volunteers.
Our first group of volunteers are the ecumenical ministers. We use the filtering feature to find only volunteers with this job skill.
Here are the results of our filtering. We select our volunteers and click the button to add them to the shift:
We continue this process, adding volunteers for all the shifts for the first Saturday church service:
Since we will have the same shifts for each Saturday service, we use the clone feature to quickly duplicate the shifts:
Here we are duplicating the Ecumenical Minister shift for the remaining Saturdays in January. Since the same volunteers will be serving on these other dates, we check to box to copy volunteer assignments as well:
Repeating this process, we quickly populate the entire month with volunteer assignments:
If we wish to see all the volunteer assignments for this event, we can click the link labeled "View volunteer assignments":
And here is our list of assignments, sorted by date, then shift, then volunteer:
