Let's take a brief moment to see the various scheduling options for groups and how these settings affect the features available.

Before starting to scheduling volunteers, you’ll need to configure things like locations and schedules. Locations ensure volunteers know where they're needed, while Schedules pinpoint when their help is required. Then, the Group Scheduler is used to place volunteers into those positions at those times.

Types of Group Schedules

There are three types of group schedules that can be configured for a group. To help simplify the editing of a group we allow you to configure which of these options are available to groups of each particular type. For instance, you'll probably want to configure your Small Groups to only be configured to allow the Weekly schedule. You can select which of these options are available for a specific group type under Admin Tools > Settings > General > Group Types.

Weekly

This option allows a simple weekly schedule to be selected. When configuring a group, one only needs to select the day of the week the group meets and the start time. We highly recommend that you use this setting because it is the only schedule option that is usable as a filter in the Group Finder. For example, if you set your small groups to the Weekly schedule option, your website visitors can find groups that meet on a specific day of the week that's convenient for them.

Custom

With this option enabled, each group can select its own repeating schedule. This option allows for the most power and flexibility, but the schedule created can't be used as a filter in the Group Finder.

Named

The Named option allows you to pick the group's schedule from a list of preconfigured schedules. These schedules are configured under Admin Tools > Settings > General > Schedules. Like the Custom option, this setting can't be used as a filter in the Group Finder.

Schedule Exclusions

Picture this: you've just finished entering all of your small groups into the system with their correct schedules and your supervisor just announced that, "groups are taking a two-week break." Not a problem! Adding a Schedule Exclusion to the Small Group group type will add the exclusion(s) to the schedule of all groups of this type. This is done under Admin Tools > Settings > General > Group Types. This not only keeps the schedule accurate, but it also keeps attendance reminders from being sent while groups are not meeting.