Six weeks ago we released our New Look, User Interface. Thank you for all the kind responses and encouraging words about it. We share that excitement.
Some of the upgrades below are on our classic pages, but upgrades on pages that have already been upgraded will ONLY be available in the new User Interface. I.e., we won't be upgrading classic pages that have already been upgraded to the new UI. This is a great reason for your pastors and staff to Opt-in to the New Look if they haven't already.
To help you identify which of your staff have and haven't upgraded to the New UI, check out upgrade #1 below. The rest of these are upgrades in response to insights and ideas from you, our clients. Click on any one of these to be taken to a more complete explanation.
- See which staff are using the Member App, Dashboard and New User Interface
- Attendance by Group report for Sunday School vs. Small Group attendance
- Bi-weekly option for pledge frequency
- Edit auto-pay for registrations with recurring payments
- Favorites access to all Follow up Notes
- BCC is the new default when you create a group
- Change to email unsubscribe options
- Choose to send volunteer invitations by email, text, or both
- Check-in detail report now shows photo
1. See which staff are using the Member App, Dashboard and New User Interface
Want to see which staff have downloaded the Member App, customized the Dashboard, or opted in to the New UI? Financial and Group Admins with access to Settings > Users can now do this. Here's what it looks like. Click on any header to sort by that column.
2. Attendance by Group report for Sunday School vs. Small Group attendance
Churchteams is known for our groups system including our groups analytics. One of the reports, Attendance by Groups, produces an analysis of the health of your small groups. The core part of the report looks like this.
This upgrade clarifies the meaning of the summary numbers. In this instance 37.2 refers to the average weekly attendance illustrated by the red arrow. This is a familiar number based on a weekly Sunday School model.
51.8 represents the average weekly attendance if ALL groups met EVERY WEEK. It adds up the average attendance of the groups when they did meet. This removes the analytic variable of consistency and is a better way to compare Small Group attendance to Sunday School attendance.
If you hover over either number you will see a description.
3. Bi-weekly option for pledge frequency
If your church does fundraising campaigns that require pledge tracking, you need to know about our pledge registration feature. Read this article to learn more. Imagine people recording their pledges from a link on your website, by using Text-to-Church, or from within the Member App!
We recently added the bi-weekly frequency option shown in this registration.
4. Edit auto-pay for registrations with recurring payments
Allowing families to set up recurring payments for preschools, schools, camps and anything else is a major benefit to Churchteams registrations. Read
this Knowledge Base article to learn more about how to set this up.
This upgrade allows staff admins the ability to edit recurring payments. Registrants don't have this access, but staff with access to registration payments do.
5. Favorites access to all Follow up Notes
When the Follow-up section on your Favorites card is highlighted, we added a shortuct option that will take you to see all your Follow-up assignments just like in the classic version.
6. BCC is the new default when you create a group
This change does NOT affect any of your current groups. It only applies to new groups, events, or forms as you create them.
By default all new groups will have the BCC option for email checked. Simply uncheck it if the group you are creating will want to be able to reply all to everyone in the group. You can always change this setting under Edit > Group Information from within a group.
This is a better default option to respect everyone's privacy concerns.
7. Change to email unsubscribe options
By using a semi-colon, multiple email addresses can be stored for any person. This change only applies to people with two or more emails stored in this way.
With this upgrade the system will give these people the option to unsubscribe from either the email they entered (example shown below) or all their email addresses. The full unsubscribe is the default.
If they choose to Unsubscribe from the one email address, the system will remove that email address from their record and log it as a Note on their profile.
If they Unsubscribe from all their email addresses, none are removed. They will just no longer get emails sent through lists.
8. Choose to send volunteer invitations by email, text, or both
You can send volunteer invitations from several places:
- Team page. Check the people to include, click the green Action button, and choose "Schedule volunteers."
- Team page. Click Volunteer button, then + icon, add people, click Save.
- Service volunteers. Under Groups & Events select Service Volunteers and create a schedule or edit a draft.
Each of these now take you to an option to choose to email or text the invitation. The default is always both like it has always been.
Uncheck the way you do NOT want the invitation to be sent. If both methods are unchecked the system will save the invite as if the volunteers were preconfirmed.
Note: If a person does not have an email address or phone number and that method is chosen, they will not get an invitation. The system will NOT fall back to the other method.
9. Check-in detail report now shows photo
When check-in is running on any screen, there is a a reports icon on the bottom right that takes you to login page to get information about that check-in session so far. One of these is a detail report which now shows the photo of any child or volunteer who has checked in.