How are you balancing summer scheduling & fall planning?

[Krista Kutz]

Hello friends,

Happy First Day of Summer! ☀️ Wishing you a healthy and fun season ahead, from all of us at MSP!

As summer begins, we often hear two questions from churches in our community:

1. How do you approach ministry scheduling during the summer months?

2. When do you ramp up efforts to recruit new volunteers?

We’d LOVE to hear your thoughts on these questions!

I’ll chime in first with what we do at my family’s church in St. Louis:

1. We schedule liturgical ministry volunteers for the entire summer through Labor Day. MSP's “sub request” feature is so helpful for filling slots when vacations come up!
   
   

2. Over the summer, we plan a Fall Picnic in early September to bring the whole community together, welcome new faces, and kick off a new year. Then in October, we host a series of Ministry Fairs after Sunday services for three weeks in a row, each with a different focus like liturgical ministries or outreach, to recruit new volunteers.

What are your tips for summer scheduling and planning for the fall?

Warmly, 

Krista

Krista M. Kutz, MDiv

Growth & Impact Manager

[Charles Fulghum]

Hi Krista and all

We do almost the exact same as what you have described.  I take the summer schedule to Labor Day but do not include.  Given so many weeks, the generated schedule is pretty out of whack by August.

This points to getting ministers to put in their away dates but that’s a topic all on its own.  We are quite forgiving in terms of subs, you put in your MSP sub-request and you’re off the hook for that assignment.  Any open positions are usually filled before Mass time but if not, it becomes the Sacristan’s job to find replacements.  Our Ministers are very good about checking to see if any help is needed on their way in.  We use the MSP Kiosk to keep track of who’s arrived and for us it works very well.

Mid-September we have our Fall Parish Picnic.  On that day we combine our 10AM and 12Noon Spanish Mass into one as a 10AM Bilingual Mass and start the picnic afterwards at 11.  We used to combine our Ministry Fair with the Picnic but while a good idea, was not working as intended.  So, like you, we schedule our formal Ministry Fair in October.  However, we are always on the lookout for additional volunteers.

I don’t have any secrets or tips for scheduling really.  After Easter I run the whole summer.  I remind about away dates before generating the schedule but inevitability when the schedule is posted, I am inundated with sub-request emails.  Anyone have tips on encouraging away date entry?

Have a wonderful summer everyone,

Charles

OLGC, Vienna VA

[enwi...@gmail.com]

I'm looking forward to hearing from others on this topic!

Our summer schedule runs from about the second or third week of June (which corresponds to the end of our adult and youth education programs) through the Sunday after Labor Day, culminating in our "God's Work, Our Hands, " a combined worship and outdoor work party event. For scheduling summer, I begin by approaching the worship planners the first week in May with a list of special summer services we had the previous year. MSP's yearly services feature is really helpful for this because I can tell approximately when a service happens and what ministries we needed. Simultaneously I email our volunteers asking for updated availability dates. I give the planners about 10 days to give me feedback, then I create a draft schedule for them to review in their Web Admin accounts. The summer schedule goes live the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend. Then the sub requests start flowing for folks who forgot to put in their "not available dates." We've been using MSP for quite a while so most folks are pretty good about entering vacation dates.

The cycle of contacting worship planners about one month before the next schedule repeats every scheduling cycle, so I will be contacting our planners in early August (not the best timing for fall planning, but we are not a group that plans far in advance).

I like the idea of holding ministry fairs in the month of October. This year we staffed an "MSP help" table before adult education hour and after services every Sunday in May. Most questions were about connectivity from home, app vs web access, lost logins and passwords, signing up for specific ministries, and general computer technology issues. A summary of the questions was taken to our leadership team. Given our aging membership, there have been some suggestions about providing a mobile tech support team.

Emily Wixson

Madison Christian Community

Madison, WI