Church Admin Plugin

Email/SMS Service Schedule

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The manual schedule send lets you email or SMS the current week’s rota to everyone rostered on a selected service, on demand, without waiting for the automated send. Use this when you want to send the rota immediately, outside the automated schedule, or to test your setup before enabling auto send.

Go to Church Admin → Schedule → Email schedule or Church Admin → Schedule → SMS schedule.

Sending by email

Select service and week

Choose the service from the dropdown. Then select which week’s rota to send — the current week is selected by default, but you can choose a different week from the date picker if you want to send a future or past week’s rota.

Email message

Enter the message to include alongside the rota details. This is the same message field as the auto email — if you have already configured the auto email message it is pre-filled here. Edit it if you want to include anything specific to this particular send, such as a reminder about a special event or a change to the usual format.

Send

Click Email schedule. The email is sent immediately to everyone rostered on the selected service for the chosen week who has an email address stored in the directory and has not opted out of schedule emails. The screen confirms how many emails were sent.

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.

Sending by SMS

Before you start

SMS sending requires Twilio to be configured and mobile numbers to be in e164 format. See SMS settings and e164 phone number format.

Select service and week

Choose the service and the week to send for, as with the email send above.

SMS message

Enter the message text. Keep it under 160 characters to avoid multi-segment SMS costs. The same shortcodes are available as in the auto SMS setup:

  • [first_name] — the recipient’s first name
  • [last_name] — the recipient’s last name
  • [service_date] — the date of the service
  • [service_name] — the name of the service
  • [rota_task] — the job they are rostered for
  • [rota_entry] — the full rota entry for their slot

Send

Click SMS schedule. Messages are sent immediately via Twilio to everyone rostered on the selected service for the chosen week who has a valid e164 mobile number in the directory. The screen confirms how many messages were sent.

Common uses for manual send

  • Testing — send to yourself before enabling auto send to check the message looks right and arrives correctly
  • Last-minute reminders — send a reminder on the morning of the service if you want to give volunteers a final nudge on top of the automated weekly send
  • Covering for a missed auto send — if the auto send didn’t go out due to a cron issue, use the manual send to get the rota out immediately
  • Sending a future week in advance — if you want to give volunteers more notice than the auto send timing allows, send the rota for a future week manually

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