There are different ways to send group scheduling communications from Rock. You can send scheduling confirmation requests from the Group Scheduler page (see Use the Group Scheduler), or you can wait for a job to run to send them for you. You can also send custom one-time communications if you need to. Send Group Schedule Notifications Job Rock will automatically send out confirmation and schedule communications based on the values you set on the Group Type Detail page. By default, these communications will be sent daily at 4pm to people who have not already received them. If you want to change the sending time, you can edit that time in the "Send Group Schedule Notifications" job, which can be viewed under Admin Tools > Settings > System > Jobs Administration. We have "Scheduling Confirmation Email" and "Scheduling Reminder Email" system communications already set up for you, which are of course customizable to fit your organization’s lingo. Just like all system communications, you can view and modify them under Admin Tools > Settings > Communications > System Communications. See our System Communications article in the Communications guide for more information. Custom Group Scheduling Communications While schedule and confirmation communications are certainly useful, sometimes you’ll want to send other types of communications to your teams. On top of that, maybe you just want to contact volunteers who have Accepted the invite, or only those that are serving on Sunday. The Group Schedule Communication block lets you do all that, and more, quickly and easily. You can navigate to it directly from People > Group Scheduling > Group Schedule Communication or you can access it from the Group Schedule Status Board. Groups - Members of the group or groups selected here will form the initial list of individuals that will receive the communication. If you don’t want to send the communication to everyone in this list, you can use the other settings on this page to narrow it down.Include Child Groups - If you have a lot of groups, you don’t always have to select each one individually. Enabling this option will include members of any child groups a selected parent group has. You can select multiple parent groups if needed.Invite Status - You can choose to send the communication only to individuals with a certain Invite Status. If you want everyone to receive the communication, select all statuses.Locations - You can limit the communication to people serving in certain locations. The list of locations you see here is automatically filtered according to the group selections, so it may change as you add or remove groups from the communication.Schedules - Like the Locations field, you can select certain schedules to further refine the list of communication recipients. For instance, you may only want to communicate with volunteers for the Sunday morning services.Week - The list of volunteers will probably change from week to week. Select a week here to send the communication to those scheduled during that week.Create Communication - After you’ve made your selections above, clicking this button will take you straight to the Communication Wizard with the list of recipients conveniently pre-loaded for you. At that point you would proceed with creating a new communication as normal. Notify Schedule Coordinators Ever been caught off guard by a last-minute volunteer change? Picture this: It’s Sunday morning, the next service is starting soon, and a crucial volunteer has dropped out. As the Schedule Coordinator for your serving team, you'll be the first to know, giving you time to adjust and ensure everything runs smoothly. The Schedule Coordinator can be notified when a volunteer accepts or declines a serving opportunity, or if the volunteer signs up for additional serving opportunities via the Schedule Toolbox. The emails Schedule Coordinators receive will look like the one pictured below but will change slightly depending on which action the volunteer takes. To start getting notified, there’s a few simple configuration items needed. We’ll walk you through them below. You can start by updating the Scheduling settings on the Group Type ( Admin Tools > Settings > General > Group Types). Specifically, you’ll make selections for the Coordinator Notification Triggers. These are the notification options that all groups of this type will use by default. Note above that the Decline option is selected. This will send a notification when the volunteer declines a serving opportunity for groups of this type. Any combination of Accept, Decline, or Self-Schedule may be used. You can also select none of the options, which means these notifications will not be sent. That’s all that’s needed for the Group Type. Next, we’ll drill down to the Group level via the Group Viewer (People > Group Viewer). There are two important settings you’ll want to know about. Schedule Coordinator - This is the person who will be notified whenever a volunteer accepts, declines, or adds to their schedule. The notifications the Schedule Coordinator will receive are determined by the Notification Options. These settings override the Group Type configuration for notification options.Schedule Coordinator Notification Options - You can customize notification settings for this specific group, overriding the default settings at the Group Type level. To use the default settings, select nothing. Otherwise, choose the desired notifications for the Schedule Coordinator. If notifications are enabled at the Group Type level but you want to disable them for this group, select None. The System Communication (Admin Tools > Settings > Communications > System Communications) that the Schedule Coordinator receives is the Scheduling Response Email. It’s ready to use out of the box and contains all the logic needed to decide whether to send an accept, decline, or self-schedule notification.