The following is an email we sent today to our Scheduler customers. We have heard from many of them that they are temporarily switching from daily delivery to once or twice a week (with extra frozen meals) until the pandemic has run its course. This requires them to make some mass changes in their schedules, canceling deliveries on some days but needing additional volunteers on the remaining days to help with the increased volume of food needed to see our seniors through multiple days between deliveries. In the email we offer some tips on how to best do this.
If you didn’t receive this email but would like to be on our email list, or if you have any questions, please contact us.
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Greetings Friends of MOW Scheduler,
It has been an unusual and challenging first quarter for all of us. Through the lens of MOW Scheduler, we watched you work hard on nights/weekends to maintain services under new challenges and limitations. we watched in awe of your dedication, and feel a sense of purpose ourselves when we get to help you in some small ways.
We want to share with everyone a few quick tips we learned working with some of you in the last few weeks:
- If you are temporarily consolidating home deliveries to fewer days a week
You can suspend the “off days” in two ways:
1. cancel them individually on the weekly calendar, one day or week at a time – this works well if the changes are fluid and temporary in nature.
2. deactivate them on the “job settings” page – this works well if the changes for this week are staying next week and the week after, for an extended period of time. You can re-activate the off days when things eventually go back to normal. Your previous job settings and ongoing assignments will still be there when you reactivate the day. - You may be doubling/tripling volunteers to cover each route because reduced days/visits means bigger pack of meals for each client
The easiest way to manage that is to simply up the “minimum number” of driver and/or server of those routes (say from 1 to 2, or 3) on the “job settings” page. simply click on the existing number in the gray circle for each shift to change it. A route will be “pink” on the calendar when the new number isn’t met yet. Also a route will stay on the “Help Wanted” board until the increased number is met.
- You’ll probably want to communicate operational and schedule changes to all your volunteers
The “copy email to clipboard” feature that helps email-broadcast a message to a large audience comes in handy in this case. You can refresh your memory on the feature on our “help site”, or here.
- You may be seeing a big surge of new volunteer applications
… and along with that lots of data waiting to be keyed into Scheduler. We’d like to remind you that options are available for enabling an “integrated” online application that sends submitted data directly into our database. You can read about two options to make that happen on the “Volunteer Application Form” page, under “System Admin”. Talk to us to find out more if you are interested. - Lastly, remember the next Monthly Email Reminder goes out at 9AM on 4/28. If schedules remain fluid and less than predictable 2, 3 weeks form now, consider taking the action that suits you better between the following:
(a) let your volunteers know that due to unusually-dynamic operational conditions, unexpected schedules may appear in the 4/28 reminder, especially those of latter weeks of the month, and to check with you when they have questions.
(b) turn off the monthly email reminder (do that on the “Site Preferences” page under “System Admin”) and rely only on the daily reminders which are intrinsically more up-to-date. Make yourself a note to re-evaluate and/or turn it back on at a later time.
stay safe!
The Purplewire Team