ShulCloud allows you to schedule honors in advance of a holiday, assign them to specific honorees, and then notify the honorees to allow them to confirm or turn down the honor.
To get started, go to Admin Menu - My Lists, and select "Honor Schedule Type" from the drop down:
You can click "Add New" to enter in the name of your new Honor Schedule type. You only need to make one honor type per day. When you assign the honors, it will stay attached to the honor type and can be copied over year to year.
Once you have added your honor types, you can now set up the sessions themselves. Go to Admin Menu - Gabbai, and then select "Honor Scheduling" on top. You can then click on "New" to create a session:
- Name - The name of your session. Might be the same as your Session Type.
- Session Type - Pulled from the list you created in My Lists. Once you add your session, you CANNOT change the type.
- Date - Pick the date from the calendar popup.
- Location - Where this service will be taking place.
- Note - Add an admin note regarding the session.
- Show Assignments for - Link your honor session to your High Holiday seating. Select the year of seat assignments here.
- Which Sessions - Select which of your High Holiday seat sessions this links to.
Once you have added your sessions, click "View" to access the setup for the actual honors themelves. You will get a blank page (if you have no used that honor session type before). Click "New Item" to add a new honor, and enter the time, name of the honor, and page number. The honors will automatically save as you enter them:
The honors will automatically reorder by time of the honor. Please note: do not use the same time for multiple honors. The honors will then sort randomly. You MUST use different times to have the honors filtered correctly.
After you have added all of your actual honors, you can click on the plus sign underneath each honor to assign it to a person. As you start to type in someone's name, the database will search automatically for any match, and allow you to select that name.
Please note: honors can be assigned only to an individual, NOT an account. If you will be honoring multiple people in the same account, you must either list one person in the account or each person individually.
Change the Status to "Requested" to indicate that you want the person to review and reply. The dates the offer starts and ends is the date range that person will see the honor in their account.
Once you have added all of your honorees, you can then send them an email to notify them of their pending honor. Go to Admin Menu - Mail, then create new mail. The list you want to select is "Honor Scheduling." Then the Session and Honoree type you want to notify, and then continue:
In Step 4, you can use token (in the Mail Builder) or the email tags (in Rich Text) to personalize the letter for each recipient:
Once the emails have been sent, someone with a pending honor would see this message on their "My Account" page:
Clicking the link will take them to a page to review their honors, where they could accept or decline:
As people accept or decline honors, the status in the session will update: