Inside MSP, the term volunteer refers to any person that will be scheduled in any of your ministries. You can optionally choose to change the term “Volunteer” in the program to any other label, such as Minister, by selecting “Change label used for volunteer” from the Edit menu inside of MSP.
Entering information about your volunteers can be the most time consuming part of the set up process. If you already have a document on your computer containing your volunteers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, and / or email addresses you can save yourself much of this data entry work by using the Import Volunteers feature. Moreover, if this information is entered into an external church management program with which MSP integrates, one-click import and synchronization of volunteer information is possible. Otherwise, you’ll need to enter each volunteer’s name and other information manually.
A video tutorial for this topic is also available.
New Volunteer
Click the button to create a new volunteer in the system if manually entering your volunteers.
Edit Volunteer…
Click on a volunteer’s name and click the “Edit Volunteer…” button to edit or view that volunteer’s profile information.
Delete Volunteer…
Click on a volunteer’s name and click the “Delete Volunteer…” button to delete that volunteer’s record. Note that deleting a volunteer removes all record of that volunteer from MSP, including their scheduled assignments and scheduling history. If you still need to run reports on a volunteer or look up their information, it is not recommended to delete their profile.
The tools MSP provides for finding, listing and browsing volunteers are located on the Volunteers pane. Click the Volunteers heading on the left side of the program’s main screen to navigate to this pane. The filtering tools discussed here may also be used in many other lists throughout MSP.
Navigating the Volunteer List
You can use the arrow keys as well as the page up/down keys to navigate the list. To jump to a particular volunteer, type the beginning of that volunteer’s name as it is displayed in the list. This “jump to” feature also works in any other volunteer list in the program.
Quick view
When you select a volunteer from the list, a summary of the information you have entered about that volunteer is displayed under the “Quick view” heading on the right hand side of the screen (see illustration). You may customize the information shown in this quick view area by clicking on the word “customize” in the top right corner of the area.
Sorting the List of Volunteers
List Options
The checkboxes in this section allow you to filter the Volunteers list to show just volunteers who meet specific criteria, such as those who belong to a certain ministry.
- “Only show” will begin setting up a filter.
- “Name contains” will only show volunteers who have a certain (full or partial) first or last name.
- “Are qualified” allows you to only show volunteers qualified in that minstry.
- “Other filter | specify…” allows you to filter by other criteria, such as unavailable times or custom fields. Click on the word “specify” to see the advanced filtering options that are available. These options are covered in more detail in the Guide to Filtering.
- “Sort volunteers by last name,” and “List volunteers last name first,” in the lower right corner of this screen will change the way volunteers are listed both on this screen and throughout the entire program.
