I recently gave a talk to a group of community and business people on values. I chose this topic because our values for service and innovation are so important to our company being what the Lord wants it to be. Behind each one of the upgrades below is a commitment on the part of our team to listen to our clients, really hear their needs, and innovate solutions that serve them well.
Data clarity and confidence is a real problem for churches. We've implemented lots of checks and balances through the years to help with this. Upgrades 1-3 mentioned below are just the latest ones.
The last two focus more directly on people. One on making payments due and recurring payments more visible in the App for things like camp and school tuition. The other provides a bit more clarity for those responsible for creating volunteer schedules.
Here's a summary with a link to that section.
- Approval required before member data is updated
- Step between setting up and sending statements by email
- Member attribute sort ordering clean up
- View payments due and recurring payments in the App after event start date
- Volunteer scheduling notification that all are pre-confirmed
1. Approval required before member data is updated
Off by default there is a new setting (Settings > Accessibility > Member App section)
that can be enabled to "Require Member Update Approval."
This option will require a staff person to approve a change in member information when members (member level access only) update their information through the Member App, Text-to-Me, email invitation to update their information, Volunteer Schedule, etc.. After the update, member will see this notification.
The email address(es) entered in the "Approval Notification Email" box shown above (after option is selected) will receive an email with details and a link to approve or deny the update.
In addition staff with Admin Assistant access and above will be able to view and approve pending changes by selecting Members > Member > Approve Updates.
Here is a Knowledge Base article on How members update their information that has been updated to take into account this change.
2. Step between setting up and sending statements by email
In order to help you avoid accidentally emailing statements before you're ready and show you who will receive them, including people in other households who may have the wrong email address we added a step in between setting up and sending statements. After you run statements as normal, there is a new information pop-up alerting you to this new step.
It tells you exactly what to expect next. The system will tell you how many statements you are about to send. If there are potential conflicts, it will notify you of that as well.
3. Member attribute sort ordering clean up
We had several clients ask for help to clean up the sort order of their Member attributes (Members > Settings > Member Attributes). Use the new "Space Sort Order by 10s" button on the top of this page to renumber the sort order by 10s. This gives you more room to add and organize these attributes without changing the current sort order.
Use the Divider/Heading attribute type to organize member attributes in sections like Kids, Connect, Serve, & Office.
4. View payments due and recurring payments in the App after event start date
Last year we upgraded event registrations to take recurring payments. This is perfect for things like camp or school tuition. Our logic for showing events in the App was based on the event start date, so payments that remained were hidden from view in the App after that date passed. With this update, events that are created to "Allow Recurring Payments" will stay visible until the event is manually made inactive.
5. Volunteer scheduling notification that all are pre-confirmed
When a Service Schedule is changed from Draft to Active, the system emails all the volunteers who are invited to Accept or Decline a service opportunity. Those who are prescheduled do not get this email. Both of these groups get the reminder emails and texts. After the draft is made active an Email Invitation Page is shown to confirm the emails were sent. This update checks to make sure emails were actually sent. If 100% of the volunteers are pre-confirmed (i.e. no email invitations were sent), this page is skipped and the system show this message.