Configurable Shift Reminders

Shift reminders are scheduled email (and optionally SMS) messages sent to volunteers before their shift starts. You can stack multiple reminders per campaign — for example, one three days out and another the morning of — and control which channels each one uses.

Default schedule

If you don't customize anything, campaigns use the org's default schedule, or the built-in default if the org hasn't set one either: a single email reminder sent three days before the shift, plus another sent eight hours before.

Resolution order

1. Campaign-level override, if one has been configured for this campaign
2. Organization-wide default, if the campaign doesn't override it
3. Built-in default (3-day and 8-hour email reminders) if neither is set

Customizing per campaign

Open the campaign, go to Edit, and select the Communications tab.

• Toggle Use the default reminder schedule off to set a campaign-specific schedule, or leave it on to inherit the org default.
• Add or remove reminder rows as needed. Each row has a value and a unit (Minutes, Hours, or Days) that together define how far before the shift start the reminder fires.
• Each row has its own Email and SMS checkboxes, so you can mix channels across reminders — for example, an email three days out and a text message one hour out.
• Save to apply the schedule. This also rebuilds the scheduled jobs for every upcoming occurrence of the campaign's shifts.

Duplicate offsets are collapsed automatically, and any row with no channel selected or a non-positive offset is dropped when the schedule is saved. Rows are stored and evaluated furthest-out first.

How reminders are actually sent

• Each reminder entry becomes a scheduled job timed to fire at the shift's start time minus the configured offset.
• A background process drains due jobs every five minutes.
• Email reminders are sent through the standard event-reminder email job.
• SMS reminders go through the SMS facade, which checks that the organization has SMS enabled, filters out any contact who has opted out or unsubscribed from texts, confirms a usable phone number is on file, renders the org's SMS reminder template (which supports event and campaign merge tokens), and sends it via Twilio.

Reconciliation

Whenever shifts on a campaign are created, edited, or extended, the reminder schedule is automatically reconciled against the new set of occurrences — so newly added shifts pick up the same reminder schedule without any manual re-save.