Happy Thanksgiving!  In our prayer time this morning, we remembered things about Churchteams for which we thank God.  Mark summarized it best: relationships. Not only incredible relationships with each other as a team, but incredible relationships with our clients and so many others.  In other words, you.  Here are a couple of fairly major upgrades that came from your ideas.  Hopefully you will find these very helpful.

We do dedicated blog posts and emails for major changes like the Workflow feature we've talked about a lot the past couple of months.  But in addition, there have been a lot of other less major but still significant upgrades the past three months or so.  Here is a quick overview of the rest of this post:

1. Changed Email Providers
2. Errors Using Email Personalization
3. Unsubscribe Notices If Emails Are Scheduled
4. Text To Give To A Designated Fund
5. Tracking Assimilation Progress Through Groups Report
6. Check-in: Re-print Name Tags And Security Labels
7. Registration Links Improved
8. Limit Coach Level Access To Search
9. Browse Groups Page Style Options
10. Add Leader Count to Attendance By Group Report
11. Track Recurring vs. Non-recurring Donations
12. Merge Groups Options

1. Changed Email Providers.  We made a major change in our email system the past couple of months moving from one provider to another one because of changes in the business model of the original provider.  Two big advantages of the new provider relate to email history.

1. Email history populates much faster making it more usable.
2. Email history shows not only that people opened their email, but also if they clicked something to respond to it.

2. Errors Using Email Personalization.  The "Email request for updated information" report and email / text templates for the Workflow feature allow you to add and as radicals to personalize emails / texts. However, our primary Email options do not currently support this personalization (that's coming). Until then, there's now a feature that catches misapplications of these commands and gives you a pop-up warning. That way you won't send out any goofy looking emails.

Have you ever wished there was a way to make sure everyone who asked for something from you or your church got what they needed?   

I just Googled "church response cards" and there are some great blog posts and articles on why use them as well as best practices on how.  However, when Sunday afternoon or Monday comes, it all boils down to one thing ... entering all this information into the database.  Only then can all the other assimilation processes and workflows be launched. The best way to do that in Churchteams is by using Check-in.  

The heart of our calling as church staff and pastors is to provide the tools to make sure people are connected, cared for, discipled and launched into ministry. Intrinsically, we know that technology ought to be able to help us accomplish this.  Here are 2 ways automation through technology can serve your ministry. 

It is no secret that the best way to collect data on Sunday morning is through children's check-in.  The reasons are obvious:

Last week we released the Workflow feature and blogged on the details of that release.  In this post, we'll show you how to build a Workflow in four steps.  Give it a try and then, if it's helpful, share this post with fellow staff members and others.

Ready to automate some of those important but repetitious communication and follow-up tasks?   Workflows are here and just released!  Read this post carefully to get the details.

So far in this series we've looked at how assimilation relates to evenagelism and discipleship.  We've talked about it being a process that is more complex than it appears and that groups are a great way to shepherd people at different places on a spiritual continuum toward the same goal of full church engagement.  Today's topic is more traditional in nature, but with a little twist.  It's on using attributes -  pieces of information you track on a person's individual profile - as benchmarks.  

Webster defines process as "a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end".  Naturally, we imply from this that all processes are linear.  In assimilation, this means we are looking for the strategic steps we want people to take in moving from first time guests to fully engaged members of our church.  We want steps 1, 2, 3, 4 to be crystal clear and then everyone involved to faithfully march through these steps.  The problem is that people don't start at the same place along the spiritual growth continuum and they aren't gifted the same.  So as you begin creating structure to execute the strategy, managing process gets complicated. We've found it helpful to think of assimilation as a network of groups to manage this complexity.  These groups serve as pools and  dashboards for managing the movement of people through process.