Friday – February 13, 2009

Breaking news! … Wednesday night we released the biggest set of new features we’ve ever done at one time. All available to you right now and with no additional cost and no change to our pricing structure. And it includes some really significant and cool features. Here’s a run down.

Automatically Track A Member’s History Of Group Involvement

We now automatically capture the dates when a member is added to a group (you’ll see that date on a group’s information page) and when they are removed unless both are done on the same day. This allows us to track a history of each person’s group involvement including attendance. View a member’s profile and you can see the dates they were in any particular group. Click the history link on the bottom of a the group information page (appears when there are members who have been removed) and you can view the history of all the members who have ever been a part of that group. All member start dates were initially set to the start date of whatever group they are currently in. Members can join a group and leave multiple times.

Historical Attendance Records

Attendance reports you pull from the Group Reports page will now be able to reflect accurate attendance data for whatever period of time you choose from 2/12/2009 forward. Because of the new “tracking of member history of group involvement”; if a person is no longer in a group, but you want attendance from when they were in the group, the tool will include that attendance. Note: The end of month summary spreadsheets you receive by email already reflect this same level of accuracy.

Individual Birth Dates, Spiritual Gifts, and Anything Else

The Member Administrator can customize any member level attributes to reflect information that a church wants to record, track and report on for prospects and members. By default we’ve included birthdate, marital status, first visit, second visit, attended new member class, date joined, date baptized, method of joining, membership notes, spiritual gifts, ministry interests and team style/personality. You can edit or remove these just as you can the group profiles. They can be date, drop down list (with the option of allowing one or multiple selections), or text fields. Login with your new Membership Admin login (see below), click member customization, then customize member attributes.

While you’re on the member customization page, review the other options there for Church Member Types, Family/household attributes (these relate to the whole family, ex. wedding anniversary), Member age categories, and Contact/Event types. All but Family/household attributes have been a part of the tool in the past (on group admin main menu – see advance setup options or click on customization features then customize groupfinder) and are still accessible by the Group Admin. Note: Continue to use Contact/Event types to track open-ended contacts like prayer requests, connection notes, pastoral care notes, and coaching notes for leaders.

All of this information can be filtered under group or member reports in the reports/communication area. For example, you can now create a member listing (or email, labels, or export) of everyone in your church with the spiritual gift of helps, in a group and with a birthday between 1/1/1980 and 12/31/1989. This is an incredibly powerful new feature.

You will see all this information for each individual under view profile from the group page or via browse members.

Note: We’ve also added family/household roles to designate adults in the household from students, children and others.

Text Messaging

One of the new member level fields we added was a drop down for mobile phone service provider. When you collect and enter a member’s 10 digit cell number and their service provider (to do that, select view profile on group info page or via browse members), you will notice that the cell phone for that member is highlighted. By clicking on the cell #, you can type an email and send it as a text message to the recipient’s cell phone. If the recipient responds, the response will show up in your inbox. Underneath the list of members for each group is an option to text message the entire group. Your student ministry staff is going to love this!

Contributions

We completed this a few months ago but hadn’t released it for general use until now. This is viewable only at the new Member Administrator and Administrative Assistant levels. There is a video on both of those main menus that walk you through this feature. It uses a fast incremental search to easily find people by name or ID; pre-populate based on giving habits; preview and reconcile a batch; show giving summaries based on type of gift, designation of gift, group involvement (or not); and email the results before closing a batch.

Membership Administrator and Administrative Assistant Level Logins

Add the two letters ma to the end of your current Group Administrator password to login as the Member Administrator. Add the letters aa to the end of your current Group Administrator password to login as the Adminstrative Assistant. The Member Administrator has access to change all 7 function-focused passwords, customization options for contributions, customization options for membership, and individual contribution reporting options. The Administrative Assistant is a simpler menu for data entry for contributions, membership and group information.

Budget Bailout?

We might not be able to solve the economic issues in the US with this release; but if you want to consider pulling your databases together into one software we are now ready to move you that direction and that might save you some money. You have access to all these features now and we’re not changing our pricing structure or offering different modules. If you want to transition to Churchteams as your full database we are offering a free conversion/import of the data from your existing database into Churchteams for the first 5 churches that want to use Churchteams as their full database.

Want More Information?

Remember the Churchteams demo webinar? Over the next several weeks, I’m going to offer an Upgrades Demo Webinar for whomever might be interested. Not only will you see the details of these features, but we can talk through the thinking behind them and interact on your questions, thoughts and ideas. When you click on that link, be sure to select an “Upgrades Demo” webinar.

Use the Self-Update Option

You now have a report option (Reports & Communication, then member or group reports) to “Send request for updated member information”. This option sends an email to members with a link to update their personal information with one click. It is essentially a self-updating database!

Ideas on how to use this Request for updated member information:

1. Collect updated emails on a Sunday morning and explain that you are using a new self-updating database. Then email everyone a link to update their personal information. You customize email content.
2. Go through this process at least once or twice a year.
3. Use it to have people re-up their membership commitment.
4. Include a link in the email to a spiritual gifts, ministry interests, temperament or any other kind of assessment and have members enter the results themselves!
5. Align the spiritual gifts email with a sermon series related to serving and spiritual gifts. Incorporate it as part of a church-wide campaign.
6. Use this system to collect everyone’s cell phone and carrier to text reminders and last minute information when necessary.
7. What other information do you wish you had about your people? Add it as a customized membership attribute and send out the request.
8. Send the request multiple times as reminders. Filter out those who’ve already updated their information.

See the information above to customize membership attributes.