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Communicating with Volunteers and Parents

Now that you have done the hard work of creating assignments for children and volunteers, it's time to reap the rewards! There are many things you can do at this point but you mainly want to be able to find all your children quickly and communicate with their parents easily. Additionally, you need to communicate with volunteers often for last minute changes, assignment reminders, and requests for backup help.

Use People Query Builder to find children and volunteers and send an email, create a group, print address labels, and so on. This option provides you a quick way to communicate with parents and volunteers through group email.

Parents

In this section, you will focus on displaying parent information from a query for your children.

To find a particular group of children:

1. Click People > Search > People Query to display the People Query Builder.
2. Select the following from the displayed fields
   1. Search by: Participant Assignment
   2. Field: Room Location Class
   3. Comparison: Equal To
   4. Value: Children's Ministry > Children's Service > 1st Grade
3. Click Run. A list of all children with a 1st Grade assignment appear. Select the check box in the header row to select all students.
4. Click the Actions gear at the bottom of the list. Select View parents or children...and then select Parents of selected >>. A new list of people appear. This will be the list of all individuals who have either Head or Spouse household member positions for the children in the 1st Grade classes.
5. Select the check box in the header row to select all parents.
6. Click the Actions gear at the bottom of the list and select Send an email to quickly send an email to all of your 1st Grade parents.

Note: If you want to communicate with all students in your children's activity, change your query options in step 2 to: Search by: Participant Assignment, Field: Activity, Comparison: Equal to, Value: Children's Ministry > Children's Service. This will display all children who have any assignment to your activity (regardless of age range).

The Actions gear also allows you to click Add to group... to create a group of children such as 1st Graders. Once the group has been created it can be accessed any time by clicking Groups > View all. The group will need to be maintained. You will need to remove children who are no longer attending your church and add those students who are new (but you can do this easily by using the same procedure as listed above). 

Volunteers

In this section, you will focus on communicating with volunteers. For example, you may want to send out a monthly reminder email to people who will be serving during a particular month. This section is a little bit different in that we will use a report to create a temporary group. Since we need to isolate volunteers by both activity schedule and volunteer schedule, it is easier to use a report with these filters already created than to use People Query. However, you can use People Query if you want to find all volunteers in your activity (regardless of the volunteer schedule they typically serve in). Use the same procedure listed for contacting parents, however, instead of Participant Assignments, you will select Staffing Assignments.

To communicate with volunteers by schedule and activity schedule:

1. Click Reports and type M3522P in the search field. Press Enter to view results.
2. Click the name of the report Staffing Pre-Assignment with Staffing Schedule to access the report filters.
3. Select the following filters:
   • Ministry: your children's ministry
   • Activity/RLC Status: Active only
   • Activity: your children's service activity (click Get Activity Group)
   • Activity Group: select all by clicking on the first option and dragging your mouse down the list or select a particular group to isolate your results to a set of volunteers. For example, Elementary or Nursery (click Get Room/Location)
   • Room/Location: select all by clicking and dragging through the list or select a particular RLC
   • Staffing Status: Active
   • Activity Schedule: select all schedules or any of the available schedules
   • Staffing Schedule: select the appropriate schedule for the volunteers you are contacting
   • Jobs: select all appropriate jobs (Note: In this report, the Select None option will return only those volunteers who have not been assigned to a job)
   • Leave the default option in Display Communication and Sort Order
   • Choose an Output Type: Temporary Group

   Tip! At this point you can click the Save to My Reports button and save this report! Name it according to the schedule selections you made. For example, Children's 11:30 A.M. Leaders or Children's 1st and 3rd Sunday Volunteers.

4. Click Run Report and then click Refresh for latest results until your report is Complete.
5. Close the Report Library and click Groups >Groups by Group Type > View All. Your group types appear.
6. Click Temporary to expand the group type. The report you just ran will appear as a group.
7. Click the group name to display all the volunteers.
8. Click the check box in the header bar and then click the Actions gear at the bottom of the list.
9. Click Send an email to send a reminder to your volunteers.

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