Use Group Scheduling Communications

There are different ways to send group scheduling communications from Rock. You can send scheduling confirmation requests from the Group Scheduler page as described above, 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 "Group Attendance Reminder" 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 Communicating With Rock guide for more information on working with system communications.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.