What we shipped this month: volunteer block-outs, a resources hub, and a smoother CRM migration

Most of what gets shipped on ChurchLinker comes from talking to churches. Three patterns kept coming up this month, and now they're live for every church on the platform. Here's what changed and what it means for you.

1. Volunteer block-out dates

The recurring availability picker ("I usually serve Sunday morning") was always the easy half of the problem. The hard half is the exceptions: someone's on holiday next week, on a work trip on the 12th, at a wedding on the 3rd. Until now those had to live in your head, in a spreadsheet, or in a WhatsApp thread you'd forgotten about by Friday.

Members can now open My availability in the app and add block-out dates, single days or multi-day windows, with an optional reason. On Thrive and above the rota auto-scheduler then skips that volunteer for any slot inside the window automatically. On every plan, including Seed, the rota detail page surfaces an amber conflict banner whenever an already-assigned volunteer has a block-out that overlaps one of their slots, so even without auto-scheduling, the conflict gets caught before publication. Members keep their own block-outs current themselves.

The model is intentionally blocked-out-only, not available-only. Default state is "ask me, I'll say yes", that matches how most church volunteers actually live their lives. Less data entry. Same rota outcome.

2. A church-wide resources hub

Churches kept asking for one place to point members at, the church podcast, the YouTube playlist of past sermons, the safeguarding policy PDF, the Bible-reading plan link. Spread across five different services, the result was always "where do I find that thing again?"

Dashboard → Resources now lets you curate a content library your members browse from inside the app. Create named categories like "Sermons", "Podcasts", "Bible Study" or "Volunteer Training", then drop in three types of resource: outbound links, document URLs, or embedded media from Spotify, YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud or Buzzsprout. Embedded media plays inside ChurchLinker, paste your Spotify show URL or YouTube playlist URL and the player renders automatically. Members never bounce out to a separate site.

Two safety details worth mentioning. First, the hub doesn't accept raw HTML, admins paste a source URL and the server parses it against an allowlist. That keeps the surface safe even if someone pastes something malicious; the worst case is "unsupported source", not a security issue. Second, you can mark a category or single resource as staff-only, which is useful for internal volunteer training and leader guides.

3. A smoother migration from your old CRM

Settings → Import People is the new built-in CSV importer. The wizard guesses how your columns map to ChurchLinker fields (so "First Name", "firstname", and "Given Name" all land in the right place), runs a dry-run preview that flags bad rows by line number before anything commits, and silently skips anyone already in your directory so re-imports are safe.

It works with exports from ChurchSuite, Breeze, Planning Center, Elvanto and standard spreadsheets, anything that produces CSV. Caps are 10 MB per file and 50,000 rows per upload, which is more than enough for a mid-size church migration. If you're moving from ChurchSuite specifically, a one-click API connector is on the roadmap as a follow-up.

What's next

On deck for next month: undo for accidental imports, drag-and-drop reordering in the resources hub, and a time-of-day picker on the volunteer availability page so people can block out just an evening rather than a whole day. If any of these would meaningfully help your church, email hello@churchlinker.com and tell us, we read every reply, and roadmap order tracks what we hear.

The resources hub and the CSV importer are live on every plan, including Seed. Volunteer block-outs and the rota conflict banner are also on every plan; the auto-scheduler that filters block-outs out at build-time is gated to Thrive and above. No setup required.