In the past, scheduling the volunteers and personnel who participate in weekly masses and events-such as ushers, readers, Eucharistic or Extraordinary ministers, child-care workers--has been an arduous, manual process.

But, there are now professional software programs that can drastically simplify and expedite ministry and volunteer scheduling, potentially saving your church hours upon hours of administrative labor. Moreover, in addition to scheduling the volunteers who participate in your weekly masses, these programs may also be used to schedule any other ministry volunteers, such as the drivers of a church bus route or the staff at the church coffee and bagel bar.

Carefully choose which ministry scheduling software package to purchase, and your church will be able to benefit from it for many years to come. Here are some guidelines to help determine which software package is right for your church.

Most ministry scheduling software provides a free trial period or a fully functional demonstration version of the software that can be used to evaluate it before the decision to purchase it is made. Because the volunteer scheduling needs of different churches can be so diverse, you should be wary of purchasing any ministry scheduling software package that does not provide such an opportunity for pre-purchase evaluation.

Take advantage of your evaluation period. Enter some of your actual ministries and volunteers into the program and examine carefully the schedules that are produced.

• Is everybody scheduled a fair number of times in each ministry or role in which they are commissioned? The software should provide an easy way to see how many times each volunteer has been scheduled in each of their roles over the course of the entire schedule.
• Make sure that the program never schedules one person at multiple times on the same weekend. Similarly, ensure that families are not split up and scheduled at different times on the same weekend. Ideally, there should be an easy way to quickly see all the dates on which a particular volunteer has been scheduled.
• Does the program respect the volunteers' preferred serving frequencies? For example, if you have specified that a volunteer is only to be scheduled two times per month, ensure that the program does not exceed that frequency.
• Does the program have a mechanism that serves as a memory between schedules? In other words, does it start on one schedule where it left off on the previous schedule, assigning those volunteers who have not yet had a chance to serve?
• Does the final output of the schedule look professional? Can it be modified to fit your exact taste by using Microsoft Word or some other word processor? Can HTML schedules be generated, allowing you to post your schedules on the Internet?

Beyond the actual schedules that are produced, there are several other secondary factors that are relevant to almost any church purchasing this type of software. These should also be taken into consideration before a decision is made.

• Is the program user-friendly enough to be explained easily and passed on to somebody else when the time comes? The various software packages available are set up quite differently, and you should be able to find one that you can work with and that makes sense to you intuitively.
• Is there a recurring charge for technical support? If so, is this cost reasonable given the overall price of the software? Is the support staff knowledgeable, and does it respond to your inquires in a timely manner?
• Will you be installing the program on multiple computers? If so, how does the program handle data sharing in this situation? Some programs are not very well-suited for being used from multiple computers, while others can share data between computers as long as they are on the same network, and still others can share data via the Internet between non-networked computers in entirely different locations.

Almost all ministry scheduling software packages can handle common needs such as volunteer mass time preferences and dates of unavailability, keeping family members together, and manual assignment of particular volunteers to specific masses or events. However, there are some features that are available in only some ministry scheduling software packages but not others. The following is a list of features that may or may not be important to your church, but that can be accommodated by at least some of the ministry scheduling software packages available.

• The scheduling of rotating teams of volunteers. For example, scheduling five teams of ushers over the course of a five-week period and then beginning again with the first team.
• The scheduling of fixed, repeating patterns for particular volunteers. For example, "schedule Deacon John for the 10 a.m. mass the second and fourth weekend of every month" or "schedule Joe Murphy as the coffee bar supervisor at 10 a.m. every other week."
• The ability to specify that the positions in a particular ministry should be filled with the same volunteers for an entire week or month at a time, instead of with different volunteers at each mass or event.
• The ability to send reminder e-mails to your volunteers that include personalized content such as the list of times at which each of them has been scheduled.
• The ability to post schedules easily onto the Internet without needing technical knowledge or access to the church Web site.

It is a very exciting time to be in charge of ministry scheduling! For the first time, there are professionally designed, powerful and easy-to-use software programs created just for this specific purpose.

These programs have the potential to save your church countless hours of administrative labor, allowing your staff to focus their efforts on what is really important in their valuable work.

Keep in mind the guidelines in this article when determining which program is right for your church, you should be able to find a ministry scheduling solution that fits all of your church's needs that you can use for many years to come.

David Beck is president of Rotunda Software.