

Pending Response Reminders

Tom Metz -

To help encourage your team members to respond to schedule notifications, you can enable the "Pending Response Reminder" setting for teams you manage.  This is done on the Assignment Reminders tab when you click on a team to see its details (see the image further down).

How does it work?

Basically, when this feature is enabled, it will send a "please respond" notification to people with assignments of  "pending" status, at a frequency you define for the team.  There are a few conditions that have to be met, so be sure to check out the "Conditions for Reminders" below.  The method of how messages are sent will be email and/or text messages, depending on how they have their communication settings configured. If Pending Response reminders are not being sent as you would expect, be sure to check the list of conditions below.

Finding the Best Frequency

Responses to assignments are eminently beneficial to your planning and scheduling.  That said, if your team members are annoyed by excessive reminders, they may grow desensitized to them, or even worse, flag them as spam and never get any more messages from you via  Thus, we recommend you set the reminders to be less frequent, then increase as you feel needed.  You may also want to remind your team of the importance of responding to assignment messages, and share with them that that Pending Response messages will be sent to help reminder them to respond.

Conditions for Reminders to Be Sent

There are a few conditions that must be met for a Pending Response reminder to be sent. 

  1. Pending Response reminders will only be sent to people that you schedule AFTER the setting as been turned on.  So, if you scheduled Jane Smith yesterday to serve this weekend, and then turn the pending response reminder on for your team this morning, Jane will not get pending response reminders.  But anyone schedule this afternoon (and beyond) will.
  2. Once they respond to an assignment by clicking Accept, Decline, or Tentative, by definition, they will no longer receive pending response reminders.  Also, assignments of a "penciled-in" status will not get a Response Pending reminder either.
  3. If their assignment status is manually changed by a planner on the people scheduling page by clicking on the assignment status and changing it, they will no longer receive pending response reminders, even if you manually changed it to Pending.  It must be that the system changed their status to pending by using the "send notifications..." button/window.
  4. Pending Response reminders will stop being sent up to 24 hours prior to the event start time.
  5. If you turn off the Pending Response reminders for your team, they will stop being sent immediately.  If you turn it back on, as long as not too much time has passed, the reminders should continue.  But if a reminder was "skipped" due to the setting being turned off, pending response reminders for that assignment may not start back up.
  6. If you change the frequency of the reminders, that new frequency may not take effect until one more additional reminder at the old frequency has been sent (for each assignment).
  7. If your church account expires, reminders will not be sent.  If your church is renewed after having been expired, pending response reminders for some assignments may not start back up.


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