Volunteers who are grouped in a family will be scheduled together whenever possible, and you may optionally choose to have them always scheduled together. Additionally, you may specify that family members are always kept together in just particular ministries, or even that specific members of a family should never be scheduled together. Family Groupings are also useful in keeping the addresses, phone numbers, and/or email addresses synchronized between all members of a family and in specifying serving preferences or can’t serve times for all members of a family at one time.
New Family
Click to create a new family grouping.
Ungroup Family
Click to remove a family grouping from this list. Ungrouping a family will not remove any individual from the program, but will remove the family settings from their profile.
Edit Family
Allows you to make changes to the family settings.
Edit Volunteer
Allows you to edit just one individual in the family.
Expand/Collapse All
Allows you to see or hide the list of individuals in each family under the family name.
Members
Click the Add button below the Members list to add volunteers to this family. Use the Remove button to remove a person from the family.
Babysitter
Often times if a family has children too young to be left alone, the parents request that they are not both scheduled at the same time so that one parent is free to babysit. By selecting family members and clicking the “Babysitter” check box (just below the family member list), you can designate which members of the family are potential babysitters. When scheduling the volunteers in this family, MSP
will make sure always to not schedule one of this family’s babysitters.
Phone, Address, Email
You may choose to keep one phone, address, and email for all members of a family, or some members may have their own unique phone, address and/or email. By default, all members will share the same phone, address, and email, but you can override this behavior in the settings for individual family members (in the Volunteer window) by unchecking “Bind phone and address to family’s” or “Bind email address to family’s” for any family member with a separate phone, address, or email. The same principle applies to service preferences. By default all members of a family will share the same service preferences, but you can override this behavior by unchecking the “Bind service time preferences to family’s” option.
Scheduling Parameters
Serving Frequency and Can’t Serve
Both preferred serving frequency and can’t serve times, however, are automatically unbound for each member of the family. Any preferred serving frequency or can’t serve time you specify in the Edit Family window will be applied to all members of the family. However, individual volunteers within a family may always have individual preferred serving frequencies or additional can’t serve times, during which they will not be scheduled even though the rest of the family may be available.
Make this family inactive for now
The same logic applies to the “Make this family inactive for now” checkbox – checking this box will make the entire family inactive, but individual volunteers can also be designated as inactive by checking their individual inactive checkboxes, even though the other members of the family are active and may be scheduled.
Never schedule this family without all of its members
If you would like the scheduler to ensure that this family is never scheduled at any service without all of its members present, then check the appropriate option in the lower right corner of this dialog.
Note that checking this option may cause an uneven service distribution since the scheduler will only schedule each member of the family when all other members are also ready to be scheduled, so use it sparingly. To avoid this, you may specify that family members are never split up in only a particular ministry by using the “Never split up family members in this ministry” setting in the Edit Ministry dialog. Enabling this setting is usually not as detrimental to an even service distribution as specifying that entire families are never split up.
Note that using the auto-scheduler for one or two ministries at a time will override this setting.
Allow members of this family to be split up in ministries for which families are flagged to always be scheduled together
The “Allow members of this family to be split up in ministries for which families are flagged to always be scheduled together” checkbox, in the lower right hand corner of the Edit Family dialog, can be used to override the “Never split up family members in this ministry” setting in the Edit Ministry dialog for just a particular family.
