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Children's Volunteer Jobs and Schedules

Now it's time to work with the volunteers who will serve during the children's activities. The first step is to create some jobs for our volunteers. The second step is to create volunteer schedules. For children's activities, there are many volunteer roles that people fill. Some of these volunteers will be room/grade leaders and room/grade assistants. These types of volunteers will be assigned to the same rooms/locations (RLCs) as the children are. For example, a 1st Grade room leader will be assigned to the 1st Grade room.

Other type of volunteers will not work directly with children, but will serve as hall monitors, security monitors, Check-in/registration volunteers, and so on. In this example, we created a couple of RLCs for Hall Monitors and Check-in / Registration volunteers. You may find it helpful to create additional RLCs for your other volunteer jobs. Remember that the RLC name will print on the name tag, which can be helpful when verifying that all volunteers are where they should be. Feel free to create additional RLCs as necessary. See Create Children's Rooms/Locations for directions.

Step 1: Create volunteer jobs

Volunteer jobs allow you to track volunteers by the job each volunteer will perform during an instance of the activity. This information is not critical to allow volunteers to use Check-in, but it is helpful for planning purposes. Creating jobs allows you to run reports to ensure you have people assigned to all jobs required for the activity to be successful.

To create volunteer jobs:

1. Click Ministry > Volunteers > Jobs. The Job Selection screen appears. Make sure your children's ministry is displayed in the ministry box at the top of the screen.
2. Click the new (plus) button in the upper-right corner of the Job Selection grid. The Manage jobs form appears.
3. Type Children's Room Leader in the Job name field.
4. Type a description for the job in the Job Description field on the right side of the screen.

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5. Click Add Job. The Job Summary appears.
6. Optionally, add any restrictions that apply to this job by clicking the Add/Edit Job Restrictions link in the Job Restrictions area. This area allows you to determine whether or not these volunteers need to have a particular membership status, volunteer requirement, marital status, and so on. Typically, volunteer opportunities that involve children require the volunteer to have a background check. This is a good requirement to include to ensure you are only creating assignments for people that are fully qualified to work with children.
7. Repeat steps 1-6, this time adding a Check-in Registration job.
8. Repeat steps 1-6 and add the Hall Monitor job. Continue this procedure until you have added all leaders, assistants, security, and any other supporting jobs.

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Step 2: Create volunteer schedules

By default, Fellowship One creates a base schedule for your volunteers that mimics the schedule you added for this activity (see Create Children's Service Schedules for details). Since there are many different schedules for this activity, this is not an ideal situation. No single volunteer is always available every time the activity is available. This is your chance to create some schedules to provide some flexibility for your volunteers and give you accurate reporting at the same time.

Whether your volunteers work every other week, or only one weekend a month does not matter. You can create the schedules that match your volunteers. In this sample you will create a school year schedule for room leaders and assistants for each service time and 1st and 3rd, 2nd and 4th, and 5th weekend schedules for all other supporting volunteers (again for the different service times). In total, there will be 4 volunteer schedules

To create the leader/assistant volunteer schedules:

1. Click Ministry > Volunteers > Schedules. The Add /Edit Staff Schedules form appears.
2. Type Leader/Assistant Schedule in the Schedule name field.
3. Click Create new schedule. The schedule will display in the Activity Schedules grid at the bottom of the page.
4. Click Edit beside the Leader/Assistant Schedule. The schedule will appear in the Add/Edit Staff Schedules form.
5. Click the Recurrence button. The Activity Recurrence dialog box appears.
6. In the Recurrence Pattern box, select Weekly and the Sunday check box.
7. In the Range of Recurrence box, type the date your leaders and assistants will begin serving in the Start date field. Select the End by option and type the date your leaders and assistants will stop serving. For many churches, the start and end date mirror the school year calendar.

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8. Click Save and then Save again.

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Note: You can add as many recurrences as you would like to a single schedule. For example, you could add another recurrence to the Leader/Assistant schedule for the next school year.

To add alternating week on/week off schedules:

1. Type 1st and 3rd Sunday in the Schedule name field.
2. Click Create new schedule. The schedule will display in the Activity Schedules grid at the bottom of the page.
3. Click Edit beside the 1st and 3rd Sunday schedule. The schedule will appear in the Add/Edit Staff Schedules form.
4. Click the Recurrence button. The Activity Recurrence dialog box appears.
5. In the Recurrence Pattern box, select Monthly and The first Sunday of every 1 month(s) radio button.

In the Range of Recurrence box, type the date your leaders and assistants will begin serving in the Start date field. Select the No end date option.

Your screen should look like this



6. Click Save.
7. Repeat steps 4-6. This time select The third Sunday of every 1 month(s) option.
8. Click Save to save your schedule.
9. Repeat the previous procedure for the 2nd and 4th Sunday schedule.

For the 5th Sunday schedule, you will need separate recurrences for every month that has a 5th Sunday. For 2010, there are 3 months that have a 5th Sunday - 1/31/2010, 5/31/2010, and 10/31/2010.

To create a 5th Sunday schedule:

1. Type 5th Sunday in the Schedule name field.
2. Click Create new schedule.
3. Click Edit beside the 5th Sunday schedule and then click the Recurrence button.
4. In the Recurrence Pattern box, select the Daily option and Every 1 day.
5. In the Range of Recurrence box, type 1/31/2010 in the Start date field. Select the End by option and type 1/31/2010 in the date field.

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6. Click Save. Add two more recurrences for 5/31/2010 and 10/31/2010.

Your screen should look like this

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