Church Admin Plugin

Auto Email Service Schedule

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Auto Email Schedule sends the current week’s rota automatically to everyone rostered on a selected service, on a chosen day each week. Once set up, the rota goes out without any admin action — volunteers receive their schedule without you having to remember to send it.

Go to Church Admin → Schedule → Auto email schedule.

Setting up the auto email

Which service

Select which service the auto email applies to from the dropdown. The email sends the rota for the current week for that service. If you have multiple services and want to send automated emails for each one, you can configure a separate auto email for each.

Which day to send

Choose the day of the week the auto email should go out — Monday through Sunday, or No Auto Send to disable it. Choose a day that gives volunteers enough notice before the service — for a Sunday service, Thursday or Friday works well for most churches.

Email message

Enter the message body that accompanies the rota. This is a plain text field — write whatever you want to say to your volunteers alongside their schedule, for example a brief encouragement, any special instructions for that week, or simply a thank you for serving. The rota details for each person are appended automatically — you don’t need to include them in this message.

Saving

Click Save. A confirmation message appears and the WordPress cron job is set up to trigger the send on the chosen day each week. Once saved, the screen shows a reminder of which day the schedule is set to send.

How the timing works

The auto email is triggered by WordPress Cron — it fires on the first visit to your website on the chosen day, not at a fixed time. This means:

  • If your website receives regular traffic, the email will typically go out early in the morning on the chosen day
  • If your website has low traffic and nobody visits until the afternoon, the email may go out later than expected
  • If nobody visits the site on the chosen day, the email won’t go out until the next visit — which could be the following day

For more reliable timing on a low-traffic site, consider setting up a server cron job to ping your website at a fixed time each day. Your hosting provider can help with this. See the Schedule Cron Jobs screen for the cron status and any diagnostics.

Who receives the email

The email is sent to everyone rostered on the selected service for the current week who has an email address stored in the directory and has not opted out of schedule emails. Each person receives only their own rota slot — not the full schedule for all volunteers.

If a job has a per-job email template configured, that person receives their job-specific template instead of the standard message. See Schedule jobs.

Disabling the auto email

To stop the automated send, return to this screen, change the day dropdown to No Auto Send, and click Save. The cron job is removed immediately.

Sending the rota manually instead

If you prefer to send the rota on demand rather than automatically, use the manual send option instead. See Email the schedule manually.

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