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Five new templates, and a help center for your volunteers
Every church builds the same handful of sheets every year. The fall potluck. The prayer vigil before Easter. The angel tree in November. The “which ministries interest you?” card for new members. The headcount for the picnic. Until now, each one meant starting from a blank sheet and remembering which five settings to flip. Today there's a template for each.
The five new templates
- 🥘 Potluck or fellowship meal. Mains, sides, desserts, drinks, and a setup-and-cleanup crew as sections, with room for several dishes in each — and the note field turned public and relabeled “What are you bringing?” so the eighth person sees seven chilis already listed.
- 🙏 24-hour prayer vigil. Twenty-four one-hour slots, two people each, grouped Overnight, Morning, Afternoon, and Evening. Each slot carries its hour, so the reminder and the calendar invite say exactly when.
- 🎄 Angel tree / adopt-a-family. One tag per child or family, each taken by exactly one person. The page shows what's left but never who took what, and the drop-off instructions go only to people who took a tag.
- 🙋 Ministry interest form. No spots at all — a checkbox list of ministries, “have you served before?”, and an anything-else box. Responses land on your dashboard and your People page.
- 🎟️ Event RSVP with headcount. One yes/no question with “How many coming?” and a dietary-needs box. Someone who answers again updates their earlier answer, so the count stays honest.
Every one is a draft you edit. The walkthrough for each, with what it sets up and where to change it, is in Start from a template.
The part we sweated: templates with sections and times
The first template, the memorial list, was one slot and three questions. These five needed more: sections for the potluck's courses, times of day for the vigil's hours, an RSVP question for the headcount, a plain form for the interest card, and private details for the angel tree. So templates can now seed all of those — which also means the next template is a data entry, not a feature.
Help written for your volunteers
Until today, every help article was written for the church. But the question that comes in most isn't from an admin — it's from a volunteer: how do I cancel? So the help center now has a For volunteers section with five short articles:
- Sign up for a sheet (no account needed) — including what the page shows about you and what the church sees.
- Change or cancel your sign-up
- Add your sign-up to your calendar
- You're on the waitlist — what happens next
- I didn't get my confirmation email — with the complete list of every email a volunteer can get, and nothing else.
Link the section from your church website's volunteer page, or send someone an article instead of typing the answer for the twentieth time.
Common questions
- Which plans include the templates?
- All of them, including Free. A sheet made from a template counts toward your plan's active-sheet limit once you publish it, like any other sheet.
- Can I change what a template sets up?
- Everything. A template only fills in a draft. Slots, sections, questions, and form-field settings are the same ordinary settings every sheet has, and nothing is published until you press Publish.
- Where did the five come from?
- From the sign-ups churches rebuild from scratch most often. We went through SignUp.com's help center, which publishes a planning guide for each of these, and built the sheet so you don't have to follow a guide.
- Who is the volunteer help section for?
- The people signing up on your sheets. Link it from your church website or point someone there when they ask how to cancel. Every article describes only what the product does for everyone, so it never promises a feature your plan or settings don't include.