Looking to take the effort out of scheduling children's ministry and put it into time with the kids?
Use titles to determine who can be scheduled
Do you want to schedule your Children's Ministry based on age, gender, role, or experience?
Click here to watch our video on how titles can benefit this type of ministry.
For example, one experienced attendant, or a certain age or gender breakdown. In order to accomplish this, you can use titles to assign at least one adult female to each room using the steps below.
- In the Ministries pane, be sure to use Titles to qualify your volunteers. Here we have “adult female”, “adult male”, and “youth” to designate the different types of volunteers in the nursery.
- In the Service Times pane, choose to edit your service, click the link to create title rules for your ministry, and then choose to have 1 adult female and the rest as “any title”, which will allow any other volunteer to be in there as long as one adult female is serving.
- Delegating Classroom Tasks
Keep family members from being scheduled together
Want to make sure there is always one family member who is not scheduled to keep an eye on the baby or need to separate family members?
Click here to check out our article on the babysitter function.
Keep assignments private
Need to ensure that assignments in the Children's Ministry are hidden from the Service Plan?
Click here to learn how we can make assignments in ministries private.
Tracking background checks, applications, and training
Do you have specific requirements for volunteers before they can serve with children? In MSP, you can use Custom Fields to track training dates, background checks, applications, and more.
You can also mark new volunteers as “inactive” in the lower left corner of their profile to prevent them from being scheduled until all of these initial tasks have been completed. When they are done, make them active to allow them to start serving.
Accommodating for the correct number and types of volunteers
Many church insurance policies now require that churches adopt the “two unrelated volunteers” rule. In MSP, this is easy to accomplish. Just make sure in the Service Times pane that at every service where you will be scheduling children’s workers that you require a minimum of 2 volunteers in each room.
To make sure related volunteers always have a 3rd volunteer, you can use a variety of methods:
- Place related volunteers in a room where more than 2 volunteers are needed
- If 2 related volunteers want to serve, place them on a team with an unrelated 3rd member so they will always be scheduled with that person
- Ask related volunteers to serve in separate rooms from each other
You can also use MSP to help assign volunteers to specific tasks in the classroom, like making sure there is always one person checking security tags and signing children in.
Just edit the ministry and check the box that says "Automatically number or label positions in schedules" and choose "Label each position...". Then type in the roles you want accomplished, and they will be assigned to volunteers in the order they are listed in the schedule.