Cascade Auto-Fill, Sub Invites, and Out-of-Office Badges

When you fill a Sunday roster on Tuesday and someone declines on Saturday night, a few features step in so you do not have to manually scramble for a replacement. This article covers three related tools that all live on or near the team and event pages:

• Cascade Auto-Fill on Decline -- when a volunteer declines, the system picks the next-best replacement automatically.
• Need Attention > Invite Substitute Teachers -- a one-click way to send a sub request to a curated list of available teachers.
• Out-of-Office Indicators on the Members Tab -- a glance-able badge on each team member showing upcoming blocked dates.

Together they handle most of the day-of-week churn so you can focus on people instead of paperwork.

Cascade Auto-Fill on Decline

By default, when a volunteer declines an assignment, their slot just goes empty and shows up under Need Attention on the event. With cascade auto-fill enabled on a team, the system instead immediately re-runs the auto-scheduler for that one slot and picks the best available replacement -- without any admin clicks.

Turning It On (Per Team)

1. In the admin sidebar, click Groups.
2. Open the team you want to enable cascade auto-fill for.
3. Find the Scheduling Settings card on the team page.
4. Toggle Auto-pick replacement when someone declines on.
5. Choose the rotation strategy the cascade should use:
   • Fair Rotation -- picks whoever has gone the longest since they last served (recommended for most teams).
   • Round Robin -- picks the next person in an explicit order you set on the team's Members tab.
6. Save.

What Happens When Someone Declines

1. Volunteer clicks Decline in their email or in the portal.
2. The system marks their assignment Declined and immediately scores all available, qualified team members for that position.
3. The top candidate is auto-assigned as Pending.
4. They get an assignment email the same way any new assignee would.
5. If they decline too, the cascade tries again -- up to 3 attempts total.
6. After 3 failed attempts, the system stops cascading and falls back to a substitute request that lands in the event's Need Attention card.

Who the Cascade Skips

The cascade respects every normal scheduling rule, so it will not pick someone who:

• Has marked themselves unavailable on that date (or has a recurring pattern that blocks it).
• Is already assigned to another position at that event or an overlapping one.
• Has hit their personal max-per-month limit, or violates the team's min-days-between rule.
• Has opted out of auto-scheduling.

This is why the cascade is safe to leave on: it can never re-assign someone who said they were unavailable.

Tip: Cascade auto-fill is safest on teams with at least 6-8 active members. For very small teams (like a 2-person Sound Tech roster), the cascade often runs out of candidates and falls through to the sub request anyway, so leaving it off and going straight to manual sub invites is cleaner.

Need Attention > Invite Substitute Teachers

When the cascade gives up (or you have it turned off), the open slot appears in the event's Need Attention section under Open Sub Requests. Instead of emailing volunteers one at a time, you can blast an invite to several at once:

1. Open the event and scroll to Need Attention.
2. Find the open sub request and click Invite Teachers (or Invite Volunteers, depending on the team type).
3. A modal opens listing every team member who is available on that date (excludes anyone already assigned, unavailable, or over their monthly cap).
4. Check the boxes next to the people you want to invite. You can pick one or many.
5. Optionally add a note ("Especially appreciate the help -- short notice!").
6. Click Send.

Each invited person gets an email and a portal notification with a one-click I'll Help button. The first one to claim the slot fills it; everyone else gets a polite "thanks, this slot was filled" follow-up.

When to Use This vs. Cascade

Both can be used on the same team -- the cascade runs first, and Invite Teachers is your fallback for what falls through.

Out-of-Office Indicators on the Team Members Tab

Open any team page and click the Members tab. Every member row shows two pieces of information at a glance:

• Their role/position on the team.
• Any upcoming unavailability as an amber Out of Office badge.

The badge format is "Out N days · next May 15" -- the count of total upcoming blocked dates, plus the soonest one.

Why It Matters

Before you spend time hand-picking volunteers for next month, glance down the Members tab. Members with amber badges have already told you they will not be available, so:

• Skip them in your mental model.
• Reach out beforehand if you need their slot covered (e.g., the youth pastor's vacation is in two weeks -- start lining up a sub now).
• Confirm the reason if it is unusual ("Out 14 days" with no reason might be a bug; a quick text resolves it).

How the Badge Is Computed

The badge counts:

• One-off unavailable dates the volunteer added in their portal.
• Dates blocked by an active recurring unavailability pattern (e.g., "Every 1st Sunday").
• Dates inside any vacation date range they added.

It does not count dates more than 60 days out (to avoid noise).

The badge appears on team Members tabs in both the admin panel and the team-leader views in the portal, so leaders see the same information without needing admin access.

How These Three Features Work Together

A typical week on a well-configured team:

1. Auto-Fill runs Sunday-to-Sunday, skipping members with Out of Office badges (because the underlying availability data is the same source).
2. A volunteer accepts in the email, all good. Or they decline.
3. If they decline, Cascade Auto-Fill picks a replacement automatically (up to 3 tries).
4. If the cascade exhausts itself, an admin sees Need Attention on the event and clicks Invite Teachers to ask a curated group.
5. First responder claims the slot. Done.

You did not have to scroll through availability spreadsheets. The system did.

Related Articles

• Team Schedule Templates -- pre-load the right positions before the cascade ever has to run.
• How Volunteer Scheduling Is Organized — the bigger picture this fits into.
• Substitute Requests -- detailed reference for what happens after Need Attention sends an invite.
• Managing Volunteer Availability -- where the data behind the Out-of-Office badges comes from.