We're really excited to announce our latest update that allows ministry overseers to create, publish and manage their rotas, all from within My ChurchApp. This is great for churches wanting to empower their ministry overseers to take more responsibility for their own rotas.

In a nutshell, we've brought all the features and functionality for Rotas into My ChurchApp and made this available to overseers. Just as in ChurchApp, overseers can manage their ministry, teams and teams members; as well as create rotas and distribute them among serving team members.

Once a rota has been created, they have all the usual rota management tools to add/remove teams, dates and members; change times, assign roles, swap and duplicate teams, and add rota notes. We've also introduced new functionality to My Rotas and ChurchApp that allows you to create draft rotas that are not visible to team members in My Rotas until you are ready to publish them. Plan ahead and work on rotas and when you're ready, make them visible to your teams.

And if you didn't already know, My ChurchApp is simply amazing in our iOS and Android 'apps' for smart phones and tablets - so your overseers can even manage their rotas on the go!

A brand new feature for My Rotas that we think will be a big help to many churches is rota sign-up. In its simplest form, publish an empty rota that serving team members can sign-up to, based on their availability. Sign-up is only available to contacts that are already members of the underlying Ministry, enabling them to select from roles already assigned in the Ministry.

Tick to enable sign-up on your rota. Set an optional 'all dates' maximum sign-up capacity, or set a 'per date' custom sign-up capacity. Publish you rota so that it's visible to your ministry members.

Send a group email to let people know the rota is now active and invite them to log into My ChurchApp and sign-up.

Enjoy a relaxing cup of tea while your serving team members sign-up. A helpful indicator bar shows you the date by date progress of sign-ups.

Importantly, 'sign-up' can be enabled or disabled on a rota-by-rota basis, and used as and when needed. For each rota you can specify the maximum sign-up capacity - both on a rota-level basis, for all rota dates; or on a "per-date" basis - ideal for those busy services where you need extra people serving. Once a date is full, no further sign-ups are possible. As you'd expect, there's even inbuilt clash detection to prevent people signing up if they're already on another rota on the same date and time.

But you don't have to just use rota sign-up for the times when you need to populate an entire empty rota. Sign-up can also be useful when you want to grow your serving team size from it's current level, or when you've added extra dates to your rota that needs filling; or maybe just recruiting for those pesky fifth Sundays that always catch us out!

Up to now, overseers have simply received email notifications when rota swaps take place. With this new overseer functionality, your overseers can now do considerably more. You may therefore want to review the overseers designated for each of your ministries to make sure you're entirely happy with those people now being able to manage rotas with this new functionality.

Need a hand?

To help you get the most from this new feature we've put together two detailed support articles for ChurchApp Rotas and My Rotas that walk you through all the functionality from start to finish.

If you don't have the Rotas module on your account, why not request a free 30-day trial of the Rotas module so that you can roadtest ChurchApp's rota management tools for yourself? You can make your Rotas module trial request here.

We know this is going to be an incredibly helpful addition to rota management for ministry overseers. This is just one of the brilliant new features that we've been working on lately - there's even more new things coming very soon - watch this space!

In the meantime, if you have any thoughts or suggestions for us, please don't hesitate to get in touch we'd love to hear from you.