We've added a new feature to help you with volunteer management and rotas. It's now possible for your serving team members and ministry overseers to record rota unavailability, perhaps for holidays and absence, or when it's known that people are going to be away.

Here's a short video to give you an overview of this great new feature.

Unavailability is a Rotas module option that must first be enabled in the module settings in ChurchApp. Once enabled, the unavailability pages become visible. Serving team members can then add their own unavailability in the My Rotas section of My ChurchApp, and ministry overseers can do the same from within the rotas they oversee in My ChurchApp, or in ChurchApp if they have manage module permission for the Rotas module.

Located under the "Next Serving" section in My Rotas, the Unavailability button allows your serving team members to add and manage their own rota unavailability dates. Adding unavailable dates is really intuitive. Unchecking the 'All day?' box allows unavailable times to be entered against the start and end dates - ideal for the church leader who's preaching away in the morning (unavailable) but still available for the evening service rotas.

Within each rota in My ChurchApp, overseers can view, add and manage the unavailability of their serving team members. Overseers will receive immediate unavailability clash notifications when creating new rotas, when recording unavailability for their team members, or when adding to swapping people onto a rota.

We've included lots of visual clash notifications too - now you can easily distinguish rota date clashes in red (where members are serving in multiple ministries at the same time) and rota unavailability clashes in red strikethrough. Importantly your overseers can readily see where the unavailability gaps are and the people/roles that need to be filled.

To explain the intended functionality and help you get the most from this new feature, we've created a great support article for

Rota Unavailability.

With this new feature our hope is that volunteer management becomes even easier with ChurchApp; empowering serving team members and overseers to better manage their serving commitments, plan ahead and stay on top of the changes. We'd love to hear your feedback. We've still got lots more planned for this current quarter - 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.