PASTORAL CARE TRAINING

Transcription

1 2013 Jeem Services Pty Ltd All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication prohibited. PASTORAL CARE TRAINING Introduction Training Notes : 3 Day Seminar Format Pastoral Care Training Notes Evening Training Pastoral Care Fundamentals

2 Contents PASTORAL CARE TRAINING INTRODUCING RUSSELL BARKER IT S ALWAYS BEEN DONE THIS WAY, OR LIFE IS TOO SHORT! GETTING STARTED Why use a software package to manage your church? Garbage In - Garbage Out Best Practices Database Audits Use the Family CONFIGURATION Editing and Deleting Setup Fields Deleting a setup item Renaming a Setup Item Fast Setup Family File Setup To Enter a new setup item Roll, Finance and Weekly Projects Global Database Variables Networking How Many Databases? SECURITY Is my data safe from prying eyes? DATA MANAGEMENT The BEST backup are Restoring Data Version Control FILE CLEARANCE FAMILIES Where People fit into Pastoral Care Variations that can be acomodated Entering a Family The Single Adult Kids without parents Same Gender Couples Family and Individual Properties Individual Features Status Individual Groups Ministry Medical Relationship Individual Dates Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 1

3 Spiritual Demographics, who would have imagined that! Flexi Fields Lists Family Features Address Other Contacts Family Group Family Events Family Dates Visitation Rapid Data entry Pastoral Notes Photos, who needs them??? Using photos to promote your church to newcomers Settle on a Standard GROUPS Introduction Tagging and Group Management USE A TEMPORARY STATUS FOR RANDOM STUFF! REPORTS Introduction to Reports Report Output Control The Report Toolbar Filters Sort Sort - Date Selection Birthdate Age Date Anniversary Date Not Exist Format Report Logic, How do they really work? Finding People Selecting a Report Template Fine Tune the output Predefined reports Church Directories Check Lists Duty of Care Labels Family Data Reports All Group Reports Individual Group History Miscellaneous Report Bar Code Reports Custom Reports Custom Letters Saving and Viewing Reports Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 2

4 SECURITY Using Security to manage your data safely Use good passwords Is my data safe from prying eyes? CONFIGURATION... ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. Think Think Think... Error! Bookmark not defined. Editing and Deleting Setup Fields... Error! Bookmark not defined. Delete a setup item and Error! Bookmark not defined. Renaming a Setup Item and Error! Bookmark not defined. Setup Best Practices... Error! Bookmark not defined. Fast Setup... Error! Bookmark not defined. Family File Setup... Error! Bookmark not defined. Roll, Finance and Weekly Projects... Error! Bookmark not defined. Global Settings... Error! Bookmark not defined. Database Titles... Error! Bookmark not defined. General Options... Error! Bookmark not defined. SMS Configuration... Error! Bookmark not defined. SMS Tracking... Error! Bookmark not defined. Configuration... Error! Bookmark not defined. SPAM... Error! Bookmark not defined. Tracking... Error! Bookmark not defined. Mailing Labels... Error! Bookmark not defined. Name Tags... Error! Bookmark not defined. Mapping... Error! Bookmark not defined. Audio... Error! Bookmark not defined. Networking... Error! Bookmark not defined. Basic Network Diagram... Error! Bookmark not defined. How Many Databases?... Error! Bookmark not defined. Setup Multiple Church Databases Best Practice... Error! Bookmark not defined. A place for everything... Error! Bookmark not defined. FAMILIES... ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. Why the family model?... Error! Bookmark not defined. The Typical Family... Error! Bookmark not defined. The Single Adult... Error! Bookmark not defined. Kids without parents... Error! Bookmark not defined. Same Gender Couples... Error! Bookmark not defined. Individual Features... Error! Bookmark not defined. Status... Error! Bookmark not defined. Individual Groups... Error! Bookmark not defined. Ministry... Error! Bookmark not defined. Individual Dates... Error! Bookmark not defined. Family Features... Error! Bookmark not defined. Address... Error! Bookmark not defined. Other Contacts... Error! Bookmark not defined. Family Group... Error! Bookmark not defined. Family Events... Error! Bookmark not defined. Family Dates... Error! Bookmark not defined. Visitation... Error! Bookmark not defined. Rapid Data entry... Error! Bookmark not defined. Best Practice... Error! Bookmark not defined. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 3

5 Pastoral Notes... Error! Bookmark not defined. Photos, who needs them???... Error! Bookmark not defined. Using photos to promote your church to newcomers... Error! Bookmark not defined. Settle on a Standard... Error! Bookmark not defined. GROUPS Tagging and Group Management The Tagging Window REPORTS Introduction to Reports... Error! Bookmark not defined. Report Output Control... Error! Bookmark not defined. The Report Toolbar... Error! Bookmark not defined. Filters Sort Date Selection Birthdate Age Date Anniversary Date Not Exist Age Sensitivity Format Report Settings Report Title Vision Logo Background Image Hidden Fields Report Settings Family / Personal Conditions Suppress Data Portrait Database Design, how does this affect reporting? The Flexible Spreadsheet The Strict Database AND Report Logic, How do they really work?... Error! Bookmark not defined. Finding People... Error! Bookmark not defined. Fine Tune the output... Error! Bookmark not defined. Predefined reports... Error! Bookmark not defined. Church Directories... Error! Bookmark not defined. Check Lists... Error! Bookmark not defined. Duty of Care... Error! Bookmark not defined. Labels... Error! Bookmark not defined. Family Data Reports... Error! Bookmark not defined. All Group Reports... Error! Bookmark not defined. Individual Group History... Error! Bookmark not defined. Miscellaneous Report... Error! Bookmark not defined. Photo Albums... Error! Bookmark not defined. Bar Code Reports... Error! Bookmark not defined. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 4

6 Custom Reports... Error! Bookmark not defined. Custom Letters... Error! Bookmark not defined. Saving and Viewing Reports... Error! Bookmark not defined. DEMOGRAPHIC REPORTS Filters DATA ANALYSIS REPORTS Family File Involvement Mapping Prerequisites CUSTOM LETTERS Mail Merge made easy Let s Write a letter Step Step Excluding content based on MISSING data Saving Custom Letters Formatting letters Addressing Letters So you really want to use address labels? Personal Hand Written Letters? Getting the Surname Field right! Adding Graphics Printing a Custom Letter CUSTOM REPORT Placing Objects on the Report Creating a church directory Page options Custom Reports vs. Custom Directory What is available to output to custom reports Sub Reports, What are they??? Using Sub Reports Combining your custom report with filters, a snap! How to share a custom report with another church! Naming Conventions DATA MANAGEMENT Backing Up What makes a bad Backup? Restoring Data Version Control FILE CLEARANCE VISITATION MANAGEMENT Do I have to Visit People?... Error! Bookmark not defined. Visitation Teams... Error! Bookmark not defined. Create a Team Name... Error! Bookmark not defined. Visitation Management... Error! Bookmark not defined. Visitation Requests... Error! Bookmark not defined. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 5

7 Team Management... Error! Bookmark not defined. Visitation Targets... Error! Bookmark not defined. Visitation Reports... Error! Bookmark not defined. SMS MESSAGING... ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. Why Use SMS? What can I use SMS for? How much does it cost? Before Using SMS Privacy Why SMS Global? Setting Up SMS messaging Tracking SMS SMS Etiquette Watch your SMS activity Using SMS from Pastoral Care The SMS Toolbar WORKING WITH CHILDREN Being Comfortable about Child Protection Use Procedures and Contact Policies to be safer than the WWC program Setting Up Care Plus Starting Up a compliance model User Defined Fields Security CarePlus Reports ROSTERS Introducing Rosters Is it worth the effort (or just how much time can you save) Blame the Computer, it has no feelings Pastoral Care rosters look different to mine, what do I do? Save Time! We don t have much of it Before using rosters, Think, Think, Think Setting Up Rosters Making Roster Setup easy Naming Conventions Preparation is the key to success Trust the roster program, it is easier than trusting your own mind Write it down! Is it really worth that much effort? Ok, I want to use the roster program, how does it work? The order of things! Loading people using filters Traps for new players! Duty Participation (Or who's on first?) Assign Participation by Team or Individuals? Adding People to a Duty Participation Properties Absence Association Creating Events with Dates Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 6

8 Replace a Date Range Auto Build! What, Pastoral Care can build the roster???? Step 1: Roster Events Step 2: Duties Step 3: Dates Step 4: Options After the Dust is settled Roster Reports Splitting up your roster Personalised Rosters Family Rosters ing Rosters What about people without address information Using Multiple Rosters for different sections of Church MANAGER Can Pastoral Care DO very well??? Can Pastoral Care replace Outlook? Settings Using Security to enhance Pastoral Care Sending s to groups of people Queue Data management for successful usage THE ROLL PROGRAM Understanding Roll Projects To record or Not to record, that is the question Capturing Data VS Data Entry Rapid data entry Setting Up the Roll Program Absent Codes in Roll Projects Include as full attendance if Using Technology for Data Entry Barcodes for Children Barcodes for Adults Super-Efficient Data Capture and Entry Don t offend for efficiencies sake! Bar Code Entry Bar Code Reports Sunday School rolls - becoming extremely strategic Let s do a Roll for Sunday AM Step 1: Gather your information Step 2: Start the Roll Program Step 3: Select entry method and go for it! ROLL REPORTS Using roll data for good! Encourage not discourage your fringe dwellers We missed you last Sending a welcome letter to newcomers, can it be done? Who are my committed attendees? Trending Report Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 7

9 Last Entry Records Reports Last Absence Last Record Attendance Record up to 41 weeks WEEKLY STATISTICS Understanding Weekly Projects Setting Up Weekly Projects Is this different from the Roll Program? Do I have to enter my roll data twice for this area to work? Data Entry for Weekly Statistics Rapid Counting Reports for Management Great Trending Reports in minutes FINANCIAL RECORDS Differences with Weekly Statistics The Envelope Please, or how does planned giving work? Setting Up Financial Projects Data Entry in Financial Records PRIVACY in Financial Records Reports Custom Report design for Receipts LIBRARY MANAGER... ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. Features at a glance... Error! Bookmark not defined. Components to a Library... Error! Bookmark not defined. Setting Up the Library Manager... Error! Bookmark not defined. Adding Assets... Error! Bookmark not defined. Operation of the Library Manager... Error! Bookmark not defined. Adding and Editing Assets... Error! Bookmark not defined. Borrowing Assets... Error! Bookmark not defined. Returning Assets... Error! Bookmark not defined. Manage... Error! Bookmark not defined. More... Error! Bookmark not defined. VISITATION MANAGEMENT... ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. Family Notes... Error! Bookmark not defined. Marking Families for Visitation... Error! Bookmark not defined. Actually Visiting People... Error! Bookmark not defined. EXPORTING DATA Pastoral Care Directory Family Records Weekly Statistics Mailing List Filters QUESTION TIME... ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. TRAINING REVIEW... ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 8

10 Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 9

11 Pastoral Care Training INTRODUCING RUSSELL BARKER One of two developers who has been with Pastoral Care since its inception over 20 years ago Database Design specialist, bringing table and low level design principals to the project Document Manager, author and design of all helps, manuals, web site etc. If it has a typo, blame me! Involved in Worship, Leadership etc of several churches. IT S ALWAYS BEEN DONE THIS WAY, OR LIFE IS TOO SHORT! This training is designed to set you free! Free from the old ways things were done, and free to learn more efficient and easier ways of doing things. I was bought up to believe there are 2 ways to do everything, my way, or the wrong way. I have humbly learnt that there are 3 ways. My Way, The Wrong Way, and the Disastrous way! Seriously, we often ridiculously hold onto the My Way or the Highway rule when time is too short to argue about what s the best way. We have designed our software to do stuff efficiently, and in a certain way. To some extent, if you want to do it another way, you will need to learn our way, or get frustrated trying to do something differently. Am I saying we are right, and everyone else is wrong? NO. I am saying, you have purchased a software product that does what it does for many reasons, some technical reasons, some philosophical reasons and some logical reasons. It will be different to how you have done things, and also different to earlier versions of Pastoral Care. So please be open to change, change is a good thing, particularly if it saves you time. Would you rather a few extra hours on this earth with your loved ones, or many hours less because you wasted those hours arguing over a roster format? Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 10

12 GETTING STARTED Why use a software package to manage your church? TIME WORKING WITH CHILDREN LEGISLATION PRIVACY DID SOMEONE SAY TIME? Garbage In - Garbage Out If it s not just all falling into place, then something is wrong! Best Practices Backup your database Use ONE database if at all possible Use the Family, it is God s idea after all! Database Audits Check out what information you store at church, and is it stored in different systems, places etc. Ask yourself, What can we store in Pastoral Care? Use the Family Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 11

13 Use the setup area to really control the look and feel of YOUR Pastoral Care program Groups, Ministries, Statistics to record etc. Notes Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 12

14 CONFIGURATION Setting up Pastoral Care is the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT area of the entire software program. Get this wrong, and the puzzle pieces will never go together. The setup area has the following areas for defining: Global Settings Family File Visitation Roll/Finance/Weekly Projects Rosters CarePlus Library Manager Registry Venue Security Vision Networking Cloud Guest Setup Everything about controlling the Pastoral Care program. SMS, , Labels, Name Tags etc Everything about people. Groups, Status, Occupation, Ministry, Dates, Suburbs etc Setup Visitation Team Names Define Rolls, Financial Programs and Weekly Events Setup Events and Duties for rostering Setup the Working with Children reporting requirements Setup Library options Setup the Registry Manager for Weddings, Funerals, and Custom events such as Baptism etc Setup your venues for management of Venue / Room Bookings Security Access permissions set who has access to what! Church Vision Statement Networking Setup Setup Cloud Guest Options Editing and Deleting Setup Fields It is very important to understand the implications for making changes to Setup Areas. The following cases apply to all items in the setup area. Deleting a setup item All people with that item will lose that item Delete a project (Roll, Finance etc) All data for that project will disappear People will never be removed from Pastoral Care by deleting a setup item Renaming a Setup Item All people with that item will now be participating in the renamed item. ONLY rename an item for correction of spelling etc Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 13

15 Notes Entering and Modifying setup items Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 14

16 Fast Setup Family File Setup Define and manage people into different areas. Shown below is the Status Setup Area. Find this in Setup Family File Status To Enter a new setup item 1 Click in the data entry box ABOVE the list of items. (It s just above Adherent in the above picture) 2 Type in the item that you want (eg: Elder) 3 Press ENTER To DELETE an item, select it in the list, then press the DELETE button Use the UP and DOWN button to move SELECTED item in the list Use the SORTED button for automatically ordering by alpha position Use IMPORT to import settings from another database on your computer Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 15

17 Roll Project Setup Weekly Project Setup Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 16

18 Roll, Finance and Weekly Projects A project is a container of events if you like. For example: ROLL: Track NAMED attendance (Tick people off a list!) FINANCE: Track DONTATIONS by INDIVIDUALS not the offering WEEKLY: Track attendance NUMBERS (How many were at what meeting etc) Global Database Variables Networking Titles Audio Options Mapping Labels s Backup File Export MOST people will need hands on help with this. Setup Pastoral Care for many computers on a network. How Many Databases? ONE Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 17

19 Notes Use Good Passwords, A strong password is Easy to remember & Hard to GUESS! Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 18

20 SECURITY Find this in Setup Security Having personalized addresses for the From field in the s for each user Limit the ability for some people to edit information. This can assist in keeping the database in good working order Keep private information PRIVATE. Such as counseling notes, prayer needs etc. Use good passwords Is my data safe from prying eyes? All information stored in Pastoral Care is saved in our own secure database format. We did employ at one stage a security expert to try and crack Pastoral Care. He hacked in in just under 1 minute! Our second attempt took him 3 minutes to break in. Our third attempt (which took 2 weeks of brainstorming and trials) stumped him. He called back 4 hours after starting to hack in, and said I don t know what you have done, but it s good You data is safe from prying eyes, as long as you use good passwords. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 19

21 DATA MANAGEMENT Power Failure Power Surge Power Outage Electrical Storm Flood Fire Theft Data Corruption Bad Data Entry Intentional Sabotage The Rapture! BACKUP YOUR DATABASE, it will save you, its only a matter of time until one of the above events will hit you The BEST backup are Done regularly Done on different media at different times (Some Hard Disk, some USB Flash Disk, some CD/DVD Stored in a different physical location than your computer. (One flood, fire or theft can take out your computer and your backups at the same time. Find this in Utilities Backup Step 1 Select WHERE to backup to Step 2 Select What to backup Step 3 Press Backup! Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 20

22 Restoring Data Find this in Utilities Restore BEFORE restoring a database, it would be prudent to do a new fresh backup first, just in case you restore the wrong data! There is NO turning back from a restore, except to another backup of course. Step 1 Select where you are restoring from and locate your backup file. Step 2 Press Restore Version Control We post updates on the internet from time to time. If you are using PC10 onwards, you will be getting automated update notices as they become available. They are worth updating to. We are very careful about releasing an update, and have rarely released an update that had a bug in it, and when we have, we have bought out another update to fix the bug! If you are running a network or multiple installations of Pastoral Care and sharing the data around manually, you MUST all update at the same time. If you try and open an older version database with a newer version update, this can cause problems. Pastoral Care 13 has automated Network Updating. If you download an update and you are using Pastoral Care in network mode, that update will be offered automatically to each computer when Pastoral Care is run. Always accept an invitation to update! Updates for Pastoral Care 13 are from the Update Button on the toolbar! Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 21

23 FILE CLEARANCE This small utility can assist you in mass cleanup of a database. It MUST be used with caution. Any areas that are cleared with this utility will not be recoverable without the aid of a backup. If you are using security, then we suggest that you limit who has access to the File Clearance area. Find this in Utilities File Clearance Church Family Records Church - Remove all Groups Church - Remove All Individual Group History Status Individual Groups Ministry Medical Relationships Individual Dates Flexi Fields Family Groups Family Dates Occupation Roll Financial Weekly Remove all Family Records: This option will remove ALL family files and related Roll and Finance data for each person. This will remove all group information from all people in the following areas: Status, Group, Ministry, Individual Dates, Flexi Fields, Family Groups, Family Dates Occupations, Suburbs, Roll Projects, Finance Projects and Weekly Statistics Removes the Group In / Out historical records. People are not removed from groups by clearing the historical records. Remove the Selected Status from all people Remove the Selected Group (Individual Groups) from all people. Remove the Selected Ministry (Active or Potential) from all people Remove all Medical Setup and associated data Remove all Relationship definitions and associated data Remove the Selected Date (Date Information and Tag To Tag something is to tick it as an option. A Tag is either On or Off, Yes or No etc.) from all people. Remove the Selected Flexi Field (Flexi Information and Tag) from all people Remove the Selected Family Group information from all people. Remove the Selected Family Date (Date Information and Tag) from all people Remove the Selected Occupation from all people For the selected Roll Project, Remove either all Roll Records or a range of Roll Records between a set of dates For the selected Financial Project, Remove either all Finance Records or a range of Finance Records between a set of dates. For the selected Weekly Project Remove either all Weekly Records or a range of Weekly Records between a set of dates. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 22

24 FAMILIES When Pastoral Care first started out, we looked very carefully at what products were already in the market place. The main product available was a program called Membership Plus. We purchased it, and tried to set up a church. Well we got totally lost. It was designed on Individuals, and they were then linked to an address or location. The HOUSE defined the family. We have adopted what we believe to be the best model for database storage of people families. It s not a new idea, but it is a good idea! Where People fit into Pastoral Care All people MUST participate in a family file. A single family file for each family. A family in Pastoral Care is: Living in a primary dwelling Has a common surname for all family members Has a Dad, a Mum, and up to 15 children in the one family!!! Variations that can be acomodated Different Surnames for any family member Single Parent with Children Single Adult no Children Single Child no parents on record Entering a Family Always follow a standard. We suggest Dad first, then Mum, then Kids, You will see this in action when we do a sample family data entry. The Single Adult Enter a single adult into their own family file, as the primary adult. Kids without parents Kids do have parents (Even I had a mum and a dad) so get the parents information and put them in the database too, then there is a proper spot for the kids. What if you need to produce some permission forms for youth group, what if there is an emergency and you need to contact an adult? Do not put children in their own file without mum, dad or both. Even if they are divorced, you NEVER KNOW when you might need to contact them. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 23

25 Same Gender Couples I have been taken to task at a previous training session for not including gay couples in my examples. We are training for what we believe to be the majority of people attending churches today, so my language is mostly inclusive of a family. This does NOT imply that I am excluding same sex couples etc. Pastoral Care will accommodate traditional families, and also same sex families. It makes no difference to the database, as you can assign Names, and Gender as you desire. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 24

26 Family and Individual Properties The Family File, shown with Marion selected. Note the Family and Individual data areas listed on the lower left corner. Family Properties Family Members (Names) Address (Street and Postal) Other Contact Family Groups Family Events Family Date Visitation Individual Properties Personal Details Ministry Medical Relationship Individual Dates Flexi Fields SMS and Lists Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 25

27 Individual Features The Individual person entered into a family file has heaps of properties or features that define them as an individual. Even nick names, individual surnames etc. All designed to profile a single person in your church. 80% of your effort in defining people is done in the Individual Features, while 20% is done in the Family Features. Individual Features ONLY apply to individuals; properties for families are totally separate. An Individual can have all the details shown below (See that Stephen is a Plumber and is 68 years old) In addition to these properties shown above, he can also have a status, be a member of an individual s group, be involved in ministry, have a defined relationship with someone else, have medical information, have some important dates, and participate in any group or property defined in your Flexi Fields setup. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 26

28 Status A status is used to define many different things about a person. Use a status to define things like Skills and Tasks. Some examples of Status s might be: Elder Deacon Lay Preacher Pianist Guitarist Lawn Mowing Team Catering Individual Groups Our suggestion is to use Groups where you are defining a group of people that actually meet together for a common purpose. Some examples might be: Outreach Team Youth Group Sunday School Leadership Team Cricket Club Ministry Try NOT to put ministries into groups. Keep all your ministry definitions in one location. Ministries are just that, whatever you determine to be a ministry in Gods Kingdom in your corner of the world. It may be Cooking, Song Leading, Preaching, Musician, Car Park Attendant etc. When applying a ministry to a person (an individual) you can define them by either ACTIVE or POTENTIAL. By doing this, you can flag people for encouragement from the potential list onto the active list. Medical Add a person to a defined medical group, and you can then add medical notes for that person. Relationship An individual can be linked to another individual via a defined relationship. Some ideas of relationship could be : Natural Father, Step Mum, Elder, Cousin, Uncle, Neighbor etc. It does not have to be one of the normal relationships, it can be anything that you want that links 2 people together. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 27

29 Individual Dates An Individual Date is an event that a person by themselves participates in. These can be Spiritual or Practical. In earlier versions (Very Early!) of Pastoral Care these were called Spiritual Dates. Some examples of Individual Dates could be: Born Again Confirmed Baptised Membership First Communion Death Promoted to Glory Holy Spirit Spirit Filled Spiritual Demographics, who would have imagined that! We imagined it, and invented in way back in Pastoral Care 3, for DOS! What is the Spiritual Age or Maturity of your church? This is an interesting question! If you have date information stored against spiritual milestones in a person s walk with God, then you can actually get a feel for how old your Christians are, or how old your membership is etc. It follows if a natural birth date tells you how old a person is in years, then a Born Again Birth date will help you gauge the AGE of your Christians, giving you some measure of the spiritual maturity of your church. If the average age is say 30 years since people were born again, then you might ponder that your flock is most likely quite mature in their walk with the Lord, if they are not, then maybe you have some work cut out for you. If the average age is say 5 years, then you have a very young church, and you need to focus teaching on the basics, and build them up to more solid food as they develop. Flexi Fields Add individual data against each of your defined Flexi Fields. A Flexi field is designed to store information that we have not catered for in Pastoral Care. Lists SMS and lists are used to mark as person has happy to receive s, SMS or both based on a list that they are a member of. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 28

30 Notes Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 29

31 Family Features Family Features are properties or attributes that apply to the family as a total entity. Such as: Address Centralized Contact Information Family Groups Family Events When defining a family group, you need to consider that a family group is a group that the ENTIRE FAMILY participates in. For example: Language Groups Congregational Groups Home bible study Fellowship Groups might be Family based. SETUP family groups from Setup Family File Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 30

32 Notes Use the Postal Address for ONLY a postal address. Pastoral Care uses that information For postal labels etc. If one does not exist, Pastoral Care will use the primary address. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 31

33 Address Use the address area to define main Family Location information. IF there is a situation where kids bounce around between homes, you will have to pick ONE home as the primary location. We currently do not allow for 2 or more homes as yet. There is room for a Postal Address and Residential address. Pastoral Care will automatically prioritize the Postal Address for mailing labels etc where one exists. Note the availability of the Hidden tick box against some fields / areas. Tick these boxes to automatically HIDE that information from reports, unless specifically requested to show (override the Hidden tick box) the information. Note : here also lies the Family , In the absence of individual address information stored under individuals, Pastoral Care can attempt to the family where a family address exists. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 32

34 Other Contacts Use other contacts to define other methods of reaching the family, next of kin, Holiday Destinations etc. You can add new items by pressing New, use the Sort Arrows tor changing the order in the list, or use Delete to delete the selected Other Contact. Family Group In the family group area, you can add an entire FAMILY to a group. These are set up separately to individual groups and status groups. The family group is ideal for language groupings, or congregational groupings if you have multiple services, and typically service loyal families. If you have an ELDER or DEACON assigned to a family for ministry or visitation, you can create a home group called Elders Name (eg: John Graham) and assign John Graham to his families using this grouping. Double click on an item to move it to the opposite list, for adding or removing a family in the available family groups. Pressing members will show you a list of all families participating in the selected group. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 33

35 Family Events The family events section is designed for recording an event(s) that either affected the entire family, or that the entire family participated in. The description is a free-form text field that can take up to 40 characters. Each event can also have a date stored against it. Family Dates Store date information that relates to the entire family. Family dates can be recorded as either a Date, a Tag (Ticked or marked as yes or a combination of both. A Tag of Yes indicates that then event has occurred, but you are not aware of the actual date. To define your own family dates, check out SETUP Family Dates from Setup Family File Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 34

36 Visitation The visitation area in the family editor can store unlimited visitation notes for the family. To record some visitation notes in this area, click on the Visitation Item in the family file editor, press the New button, and type the Date, the Requesters Name and who you want to assign the Visitation to. The Assigned To field is just a text field, it does not link to a person in your database. To edit a record, simply click on the record to edit, and make the changes required. Pastoral Care 13 has the ability to record Pre Visitation notes as well as Post Visitation Notes. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 35

37 Rapid Data entry The fastest method of entering a family is the following method. Using this method, the basic information of each family for a church of say 100 families could be entered in around 1 hour. Providing that the information for transposing is easy to read, and the person entering can touch type. Enter a new family in the following order: Surname <Enter> <Enter> Phone Number <Enter> (Note, family HOME PHONE number) Dads Name <Enter> Mums Name <Enter> <Enter> Child One Name Child Two Name Child Three Name <Enter> <Enter> <Enter> Etc, then save This is the BEST method to enter the family. NAMES ONLY! Perhaps enter the home address before saving. Other individual information can be added later, in particular group and status information is best done later, you will see why further on in the seminar. Pastoral Notes This Button, only available in the Family Editor opens up the Pastoral Care notes area. You can compose and save notes for each individual person in each family file, as well as General and Visitation notes for the Family. If you are typing personal information or sensitive information into the notes area, security settings are a MUST to protect people from accidental or malicious discovery of personal information. SETUP Security from Settings Security Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 36

38 Photos, who needs them??? If you are prepared to put in the groundwork for a photo directory, then photos can be very useful in Pastoral Care. Here are some practical uses for photos Helping new leadership team members get acquainted with church members Create a Church Leaders contact book with photos for new members Home Group directories with photos of each home group attendee, very useful in helping new home group members feel welcome. Using photos to promote your church to newcomers Any of the above ideas plus others can be used to promote your church to new or potential members. You could create a welcome kit that included a printed custom report that had Names and Photos only of the leadership team, including a list of the areas that each person is responsible for. Don t necessarily include phone numbers, depending on what level of contact has occurred before you hand them out! Settle on a Standard There are 3 FAMILY portrait positions to save photos against as well as the ability to save a photo for each individual person. The FAMILY photos go with the family file, not with individual people. We suggest that the following standard be used, you may think of another standard, but what ever you decide, stick with it Family Portrait 1 Family Portrait 2 Family Portrait 3 Group Shot Mum and Dad Only Kids Only This way, you can design and use reports with some confidence about what photos will be printed with what reports! Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 37

39 GROUPS Introduction Your church is made up of groups! Even if you are a small church, and you have no groups you still have them. Perhaps you have more than one pianist, there is a group, more than one Elder, there is a group. There are countless uses for groups in Pastoral Care, and we will be showing them all off during this seminar. If you remember one thing about today, it should be groups. If you organize people into Status Groups, Individual Groups and Family Groups, then other tasks in Pastoral Care not only become easier, seemingly impossible tasks become possible. How about sending a letter to everyone who missed church last week? But you don t want to send a letter to anyone on your leadership team because you had a retreat on easy with groups, difficult without them. Tagging and Group Management Don t use the family editor to add participation data to people. If you have entered all your family information first, and left groups up to later, then bravo, this is the best way. If you have started putting group information against individuals using the family editor, and you are finding it a bit clunky, you re not alone. Lets check out Tagging. Find tagging from Main Menu - Utilities Let s look at the following uses of tagging, these will be demonstrated only, so take a few notes as I go Review Existing Groups Create New Groups Delete Old Groups Merge Groups together RAOK Random Acts of Kindness Random Reports Encouragement Letters We prayed for you today letters! Use a TEMPORARY STATUS for random stuff! Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 38

40 REPORTS Introduction to Reports Pastoral Care has at its very core, very powerful reporting tools. There are many common controls used in the different reporting areas, including a common report output control. Much of what you will learn about reports in this session can be applied to ALL reporting output areas! Database Design, how does this affect reporting? Pastoral Care is a database. Not many people have actually had much experience with a database, and many people think that Microsoft Excel is a database. In the true definition of a database, Excel is not one. You will see why in a minute. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, the definition for Database starts with the statement: A data base is a structured collection of records or data. The absolute pivotal word here is STRUCTURED. In a spreadsheet, if you want to type anything you like, you can, in a database, you can ONLY put in what the DESIGNER allows. Let s look a spreadsheet, and the potential downfalls of storing a church load of information on a spreadsheet. The Flexible Spreadsheet You start with a list of names, address s and phone numbers, simple enough. A column for each item of data. Simple yes, flexible, well sort of. Some families have 6 children, some have none. Some families have addresses, some don t, some have mobile phones for everyone, some have one for everyone! Very soon you will end up with hundreds of columns, and not all filled in for everyone. What about groups, how many columns do you need to add for those? Then how do you turn this into a report? What about people who don t want to be on the report, or who don t want their work phone on the report? You soon throw your hands up in the air and say its all too hard. This is the problem with total flexibility, it cannot work. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 39

41 The Strict Database This design has a place for just about everything. It can handle from zero to 10 children with ease, different surnames, some with mobile phones, some without, privacy request on the entire family, or just one phone number. It will stop you entering garbage in most cases, and it will keep EVERYTHING ordered and neat. BUT AND It is strict Reporting Styles are limited Data is limited to the designers inclusion only (Generally) Finding SPECIFIC information is simple Finding SPECIFIC information across the entire database is RELIABLE and REPEATABLE Therefore, reporting and statistics are reliable and repeatable. Reliable and Repeatable are the key words to database reporting, you will always be able to find the people you are looking for, even with a changing and fluid set of information in the database, because the database rules allow this, the rigidity of the design brings reliability, the trade off is some flexibility. Report Output Control Every single report produced in Pastoral Care will be outputted to a common output control. From this control you can choose to send your report to: The Screen (Default) Rich Text Format Text File Adobe PDF Excel HTML (Import these into Word) (Import into other word processors) (Portable Document Format) (Import these into Excel) (Use these reports on the internet / intranet, be careful of privacy) Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 40

42 The Report Toolbar On the top of the create reports area is the tool bar. All additional filters and print options are accessible from this tool bar, and are described in the following pages. We won t look too closely at all of these in this session, we cover these areas in more detail in tomorrow s session. Use the process button to complete the process of displaying a report. The process button is always pressed to complete options already selected, such as filters. Use the Filters button access the following features: Filter for selected combination of groups of people Filter the report for all people who have data, or do not have data in selected fields. Useful in helping you identify people in the database that are missing certain information. Sort your report by any number of Individual Dates, Suburbs, Post Codes, Set the report for Family or Individual Mode etc. Also do advanced date search functions from this window. Carry our formatting options, like Capitals, Suppression, Portrait Settings, Background Images etc. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 41

43 Filters Filters are the main area of interest in narrowing or widening a search for people to be included on your report. Let s look at some examples of what can be achieved in the Filters area. Committed Attendee, but NOT an Elder Attendee AND+, Elder AND- Sort All people in Home Groups Home Group 1 Only! All Adults (No Children) Sorting options are ideal for managing Mailing Labels, where you want to use perhaps those individual surnames that some people have, or mail to individual people instead of families etc. This area also allows you to sort the report output by a large range of fields. Another use for sorting is to run a report on Individuals, or Families. All DATE related sort options have the ability to also Filter for date ranges, anniversaries etc. Notes Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 42

44 Sort - Date Selection Using date based information you can filter your report for advanced date functions. Such as: Birthdate Find all people with a birthdate in March. Use the Month selection in the Birth Date Sort Option to find all people with a birthdate in a specific month. You could then have a standard Happy Birthday custom letter with a graphic in it, and a scripture of Encouragement that you can post to all people each month having a Birthday! Simply combine the Sort and a custom letter to achieve this. (Naturally this will only work if you have birthdate information stored in Pastoral Care!) Age Find people who are between a certain age range, either in Birth Age Years or even Born Again years! Date Find all people who have a date within a specific period. Anniversary Enter a date range similar to date above, however this search finds the Anniversary of the date searched on. For example, select Birth Date, and an Anniversary range of 1/1/2000 to 1/1/2000 and the program will find all people with a birthday on the 1 st of January, in any year. (In anniversary search, the year component of the date is ignored) If you enter a Month, it is like the Month search for a date. The flexibility here is that you can search for even a week, and send out letters to people with a birthday in the next week! Date Not Exist Find all people who do NOT have any date information against the selected date. Ideal for tracking down people who need to give you their birthdate. You can combine this with a custom letter to post out to everyone who does not have a recorded birthdate, and ask them to provide you with one! Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 43

45 Format The Format button in Pastoral Care 13 brings together a number of features that had their own buttons in earlier versions of Pastoral Care. If you can t find something in the reporting area, have a look at Format! Shown (Right) is the format Page. Note the number of options on the Format Options list. Report Settings Report Title Vision Logo Background Image Text Watermark Field Formatting Hidden Fields Condition Suppress Data Portrait Overall high level report controls such as Page Breaks, Report Name Options, Page Numbering options and Alphabetical Separators Add your own report title to a report Add a Vision Statement to a report Control report Logo options Add a Background image to each report page Add a Watermark as Text to the background of your report CAPITALS Sentence Case and lowercase options for selected fields Hide selected fields on a report Show or Hide Family and Individual Conditions from a report Hide selected data from a report. Control the priority selection of Photos from the Family Portrait area for inclusion on selected reports The Hidden control on the toolbar overrides any Hidden options in the family editor. Use these options to force the printing of the selected hidden fields. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 44

46 Report Logic, How do they really work? To really grasp the power of Pastoral Care Reporting, you really need to understand the overall concepts around reporting. There are several basic steps that are fundamental in ALL reporting areas of Pastoral Care, they are: Finding People Selecting a report template to use Fine Tuning the output Viewing / printing the finished result These four steps have to be decided upon and either used or discarded in the process of generating a report. There are two steps that cannot be ignored, the selection of the report template and viewing / printing the output! Finding People Use the following controls to find people based on a myriad of criteria Filters Sort Selecting a Report Template Choose a report template from: Custom Reports Custom Letters Manual Reports (Pick a field!) Pastoral Care built in reports Fine Tune the output Adjust the report with: Format Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 45

47 Predefined reports Pastoral Care has a myriad of purpose built reports ready to use. They are free, simple to use, and there are many formats to suit many applications or needs. We highly recommend that you aim always to use a predefined report particularly for internal reports used by your leadership. You can spend many hours trying to get a report looking perfect, or you can press a button and have the same information ready in seconds! Pre-defined reports are: Time Savers Tested by us to function correctly Varied for different tastes Can be fine tuned with Formatting and other Data Options Did I mention they save you TIME? Church Directories There are 26 different variations of church directories. Church Directories are by far the biggest single time wasting exercise your administration staff will ever undertake. If Pastoral Care is not handling your directory printing, then you should seriously consider letting it take charge of this task! But we need to limit who goes on the directory you say Filters. Create a status called Directory, and use tagging to tag all people for directory. Then choose any one of many directory formats and bingo! Yes, our software is not perfect, but it is FAST. YES! We do Double Sided Landscape A5, and automatically collated! You can do this with any report in Pastoral Care! Check Lists There are 17 different check lists. Use these to create a roll tick list for different groups, different services, different meetings etc. Need a sign off sheet for Sunday School (Yes you do! Remember working with children legislation!), use a Check List! Just combine a filter for Sunday School children, and away you go! Need one for each class, combine a filter for Sunday School with a filter for school year, or another status for Sunday School class. Duty of Care Did I mention working with children? There are 16 different sign in sheet formats ready for use. Labels Mailing Labels and Name Tags Simple and powerful when combined with filters. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 46

48 Family Data Reports Even I forget about these gems. Reports on Birthdates, Status s, Groups, Address s, Ministry etc. There are 18 reports in this section. All Group Reports Report on all people in groups, status, ministry etc. Individual Group History Who s in what group, when they joined, and when they left the group. Miscellaneous Report These are reports that have no real home, but interesting to look at Bar Code Reports The humble bar code, it is not the mark of the beast! But depending on how you use it, others may not take to kindly to the use of Bar Codes at church. Use a bar code report to: Create a Roll tick list for taking rolls at church Sunday School. Use a bar code name tag for kids at Sunday School they are not so sensitive. (Don t scan kids as they enter church, that s too hard, simply collect their name tags in a bucket at the end of church, and they can very quickly be scanned in at the office later! Custom Reports Did someone say Custom? Yes you can create your OWN custom report templates. Remember, they are a template to be used in create reports and other report areas; they are NOT a report on their own! More on Custom Reports in tomorrow s session. Custom Letters Simply the most powerful mail merge available, and the simplest if you can learn filters etc, you have learnt most of the power of custom letters. More on Custom Letters in tomorrow s session. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 47

49 Saving and Viewing Reports From ANY report, you can save it for historical reasons, or hysterical reasons as I like to say Simply get the report on the screen, then press the Save icon on the Report Toolbar. Your report will be saved in the \Church\Reports folder by default. You may want to create different folders in that location for different reports, rather like a filing cabinet. You should use Folders in windows to organize your reports so that they can be found again. Group them by Year, then Topic for historical tracking, group them by subject if you want to use them over again in the near future. Introduction Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 48

50 DEMOGRAPHIC REPORTS Find this in Create Reports Analysis There are how many single parents in our church??? In Pastoral Care, there is quite a number of surprising Demographic type reports. For instance, do you know how many single parents there are in your church? Or how many parents there is that have no children? What about how many single adults in your church? How many people between the ages of say years, and what percentage is that group representing in your church? When you look at statistics like this, it can very much help you focus your energies where they are most needed. This is not necessarily about leaving minority groups out! It s more about know who your minority groups are, and who your oversubscribed groups are. You may find that your church is top heavy with teenagers and young adults. Do you have enough resources to fully cater for their needs, are they shopping around for more satisfying ministry etc.! And don t think your church has all the answers to your demographics needs, why not use other churches programs as well. Where I once worshiped, our church had a VERY STRONG youth group, and it shared its kids, its leaders, and camping programs etc. with other churches close by who didn t have as much youth resources. By looking closely at your demographics, it can very much encourage you to see the big picture; just don t miss out on your smaller groups when you are looking from afar. Filters Every report in the data analysis area can be filtered using filters. If you want to find out the age spread of all the Plumbers in the church, then run the Birthdate Report using a filter for all Plumbers in the church. (Not sure why you would want to do that, but you can!) Some reports are not affected by some filters. For example, the OCCUPATION report is not affected by any filters set on occupation, but you could run that same report with a filter for members to find out the occupations of all of your members. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 49

51 DATA ANALYSIS REPORTS Family File The Family File reports are where you find out the most statistics about the family. IE: People. There are 7 reports in this area, simply double click a report to run it. Like all good database reports, they need information to work. Little things like Birthdates, Dates of Marriages, Status s, Group Participation etc. These do not just happen, they need data. The Family File reports are listed below. Report Name Use Data Required People Birthdate Occupation Individual Date Family Date Residential Suburb Postal Suburb Condition Shows no of people as Adults, Children, Marital Combinations etc. Shows age splits and number of people in each split Shows the number of people in each occupation and the percentage of the church each occupation makes up Shows the age of people in an individual date group. For Example, membership, shows how many people who have been members for x years Shows the age of Families in a Family date group. For Example, membership, shows how many Families who have been members for x years Shows how many people live in each suburb in your churches ministry area. Includes a percentage of the church in each suburb. Shows how many people have a postal address in each suburb in your churches ministry area. Includes a percentage of the church in each suburb. New to Pastoral Care 13. Shows how many people participate in each Family Condition and each Individual Condition. None, although birthdates will increase accuracy Birthdate Information Critical Occupation Data Individual Date Family Date Address Data (Suburb) Address Data (Postal Suburb) Address Data (Suburb) Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 50

52 Involvement Who s on First, What s ON Second As the name suggests, these reports show who s involved in what! Or as I like to say, Who s on First, What s on second. Pastoral Care can be used to put people into groups, and groups can be used to assist you in effective (non time wasting) communication. Groups are part of your natural demographic, and at the very minimum can just be used to help slice up your church into manageable chunks for administration, and at best can help in the total management of all the people in your care. The reports in this area show statistics basically on how many people exist in the various groupings, and what percentage of the entire database that involves. Let me sidetrack a bit, this is another reason to use one database for all people, when you do an analysis like these, or other demographic reports, the percentage participation in the groups are an important indicator on the flavor of your church. You only get a full view when all people in your circle are included, and not just some of them! Here is a list of all the reports in this area: Report Name Use Data Required Status Individual Groups Ministry Individual Dates (Tagged) Flexi Field Tagged Family Group Family Dates Tagged School Year Level Medical Relationship Shows the number of people in each status group, and the percentage of the church each group makes up Shows the number of people in each Individual group, and the percentage of the church each group makes up Shows the number of people in each Individual ministry, both Active and Potential, and the percentage of the church each group makes up. Shows the number of people in each Individual Date category that have a Tag against the date, i.e. the tick box is ticked for a Yes but no date information is supplied. Shows the number of people in each Flexi Field that have a Tag, i.e. the tick box is ticked for a Yes Shows how many people participate in a Family Group, Includes a percentage of the church in each group. Shows the number of people in each Family Date category that have a Tag against the date, i.e. the tick box is ticked for a Yes but no date information is supplied. Shows how many people are in each school year as a count and a percentage of all people in the church New to Pastoral Care. Shows the number of people in your medical categories New to Pastoral Care, Shows the number of people in each defined relationship type Status Participation Individual Group Participation Ministry Participation Individual Date Tag Flexi Field Tag Family Group Data Family Date Tag School Year information Medical Data Relationship Data SMS and Lists Shows the number of people in SMS and lists. SMS and Lists need to be used for this Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 51

53 Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 52

54 Mapping This area contains even more demographic information. However, this is more about WHERE people live, rather than WHO people are Prerequisites For Mapping to work, you need to do the following: Decide on a standard street directory. In Melbourne, the most popular directory is called a Melways. It s so popular, if you say Melways in a sentence, people know straight away that you are talking about a street directory. Set up Mapping Data in the Settings Global Database Variables area Put mapping information against each family, not an easy task, but can be rather rewarding After all this is done, you can use the Data Analysis Mapping area for some interesting reports. Don t forget, you can combine the mapping reports with filters to limit the output of the reports to a select group of people! There are 2 different reports available in the Mapping Area of Pastoral Care. Map Density, and Distance Density. Map Density shows how many Adults and Children there are on each map according to your setup. Distance Density shows how many people live certain distances from a landmark. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 53

55 Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 54

56 PASTORAL CARE TRAINING Going Further Training Notes : 3 Day Seminar Format Pastoral Care Training Notes, Full Day Training Pastoral Care Expanded SESSION 1 Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 55

57 THE MAIN MENU Not many people have a very close look at the main menu, and others stare at it for hours and feel they can t see anything. As Pastoral Care is a large and highly developed program over many years, we have added a lot of features, and these can be a bit overwhelming. You won t break it If you have a backup, you should not be afraid to press a button, if Pastoral Care is about to do something that it considers dangerous, you will most likely get a Are you sure question. If you see a warning, read it carefully! But otherwise, click away and learn yourself. We have 4 sub menus if you like on our main menu, CHURCH, EXPLORE, UTILTIES, SETUP They are in order of most used to least used. Lets have a look at each tab: The Church Tab The Church Tab is all about people, and things you do at your church The Explore Tab The Explore Tab is a bit more about communication and reporting. Getting into your database and finding out all about your church. The Utilities Tab A few useful utilities, backups and restores, custom self-designed reporting templates etc The Setup Tab Get under the hood and change the flavor of your software! You CAN break stuff here! Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 56

58 The Address Book Shown below is the address book. This is shown by default, but if you can t see it, click on Church Family. For each selected family, basic information is displayed at the bottom of the window along with a photo if one exists. For the selected family, you can also choose SMS, , VISITATION and MAP to further utilize the data in the selected family file. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 57

59 SECURITY What is security? Trust Accountability Privacy Using Security to manage your data safely If the wrong people have access to the wrong areas, then your database can come to a grinding halt in a hurry. Use the different areas in security to really MANAGE who can do what in Pastoral Care. Remember that using security is not about being in control, not in a rude way, it s a lot more about protecting private data, and in the current Privacy Climate we find ourselves in, even just a phone number is considered private. Find this in Setup Security Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 58

60 Use good passwords Easy to Remember, Hard to Guess Set your OWN password, do not set them for someone else Do not write them down *** Don t use a pattern or series *** Is my data safe from prying eyes? Pastoral Care data is as safe as your passwords, Use strong passwords, and your data is very secure, use weak passwords, and your data is not safe. Passwords are encrypted behind what we believe to be an almost impenetrable barrier, and so is the database. It is impossible to connect to the database with ANY ODBC query tool or external database program or data recovery tool. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 59

61 DATA MANAGEMENT Did someone mention power failure? As soon as you start becoming even a little bit dependent on Pastoral Care software, ask yourself the question How much pain will be involved if my computer was stolen? Stolen you say!!! Well if your hard drive is damaged during a power outage, or fried in an electrical storm, then it may as well have been stolen. Unless of course if you have BACKUPS! I work full time in computer sales and repairs, and if I had a dollar for every time a person comes in and says my computer has crashed, please fix it, oh and by the way, DON T LOOSE ANYTHING oops I forgot, I make more than a dollar every time that happens! I am constantly surprised by just how many people don t backup their data. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 60

62 Backing Up Find this in Utilities Backup The BEST backups are: Done regularly Done on different media at different times Stored in different physical location than your computer. What makes a bad Backup? Something that is plugged in most of its life! A USB Memory Stick (Use 2 or 3 and cycle them) A Hard Disk that is powered up all the time A device that is stored in the same room as your computer This is so simple to use, select WHERE and WHAT and press Backup! Easy Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 61

63 Restoring Data! HINT BEFORE restoring any data, do a backup to a known different location, in case you accidentally restore the wrong backup, or the backup is corrupted and you end up in worse condition than you were in when you decided to do a restore! You can restore into different church slots by loading an empty slot, then doing a restore to that location. Version Control We post updates on the internet from time to time. All recent versions of Pastoral Care give you automated update notices as they become available. They are worth updating to. We are very careful about releasing an update, and have rarely released an update that had a bug in it, and when we have, we have bought out another update to fix the bug! If you are running a network or multiple installations of Pastoral Care and sharing the data around manually, you MUST all update at the same time. If you try and open an older version database with a newer version update, this can cause problems. If you are using Pastoral Care 13 in Network Mode, the Update will only need to be downloaded once. All other installations of Pastoral Care will detect that you have downloaded an update from one computer and will update themselves. FILE CLEARANCE This small utility can assist you in mass cleanup of a database. It MUST be used with caution. Any areas that are cleared with this utility will not be recoverable without the aid of a backup. If you are using security, then we suggest that you limit who has access to the File Clearance area. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 62

64 EXPORTING DATA So Pastoral Care does not do everything? We know that, here are some ways to use Pastoral Care data somewhere else. Check out the Export area. From here, you can export selected data from Pastoral Care into other formats for use elsewhere. One popular area for exporting to has been Microsoft Outlook, however, since the introduction of the management module, the need for this has been reduced somewhat. Another use for this could be to export to Outlook for loading contact information into PDA s, also popular with the larger more modern churches / Pastors who use such technology. Options for exporting are: Pastoral Care Directory Export a file for use in the Pastoral Care Directory Program. This FREE program on our CD is for use by anyone in your church for a free to use church directory on their computer. Forget about the paper one, this is a snap to use! Even publish bulletin like information to be exported to each home. Family Records Manually select fields for exporting family data, does not include groups etc, but basic family file data. Weekly Statistics As the name implies, weekly meeting data stored in the weekly statistics program can be exported for making more fancy reports for board / management meetings etc. Mailing List (Have you looked at Custom Letter lately???) Create a mailing list for use in another word processor. Filters Naturally filters are available for all exports that deal with people, allowing you to select who you want to export! Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 63

65 WEEKLY STATISTICS The Weekly Statistics is the best area for tracking attendance trends and offering trends. This is where you will find graphs on attendance and giving to help with monthly / quarterly business meeting reports etc. This is quite different from the Roll Program, as this area seeks to only record numbers, not who was where and when, but how many were there and when! This area requires it own setup, and will work independently to the finance area, and the roll program. So setting this area up correctly is important. You need to use familiar terminology to create some symmetry between the different areas of Pastoral Care. Understanding Weekly Projects The weekly projects are setup in the Settings Roll / Finance / Weekly settings area. A weekly project is a top level container that holds services and events that occur on a weekly basis. If you want to see attendance and giving trending of all services TOGETHER in one report, then use a single weekly project to contain them all together, otherwise, you can use a Weekly Project for each service. We prefer / recommend the bundle them all together method, it makes for much more interesting reading! Setting Up Weekly Projects These are quick and easy to setup. All you need to decide is for each project, what services and other information you want to record. In the main, most people will set up a single Project, call it Sunday. You can then create Financial and Attendance statistical titles. Finance for money gathered, attendance for people stuff. Not just attending by the way, you can also record things like Baptised, Membership, Born Again, Spirit Filled, Healing etc. These can be used for statistical reporting on spiritual or other significant events. Is this different from the Roll Program? Yes, the weekly statistics does NOT record people s names, it only records Numbers of people, Numbers ($) in financial areas and Numbers of people who participated in a spiritual event for want of a better term. Do I have to enter my roll data twice for this area to work? Yes and No, Roll data will give you names and more finite analysis, but you can transfer the names and convert that data to Numbers in the weekly statistics program. To transfer to weekly statistics, simply select a date from the roll program, and press the Transfer Button. Then fill in the fields in the transfer box to match what you are sending, and its done for you! Simple. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 64

66 Data Entry for Weekly Statistics Start Weekly Statistics Select a date for the information to be entered against Press Load Fill in the blanks Press Save That did not take long to explain, it takes not much longer to do either. The slowest part of this task is the data collection. But counting is easier than name checking! Rapid Counting How accurate do you really need to be? If your count is for OH&S, then be accurate, if it is for statistical averages, then count the number of full rows in church and average the number of people in the rows. Or if you have one or two entry points, have one or two hand clickers and have two people press a click for each person. Reports for Management As the weekly statistics can be easily summarised as graphs they are very suitable for management reporting. Showing trends on attendance and giving, the two main indicators that many churches look at. These may or may not be the main indicators for your church, however they are important! Great Trending Reports in minutes A picture is worth a thousand words, so we will just click through a few reports. You will see just how useful and easy they are to produce. Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 65

67 FINANCIAL RECORDS Differences with Weekly Statistics In Weekly Statistics, you can setup financial categories to track trending into. These are intended for summarized data, not individual data. Financial Records is to money, what the Roll Program is to attendance! That is, individual tracking of giving. The Envelope Please, or how does planned giving work? There are some denominations who record the money given by individuals. Pastoral Care allows this to be recorded and reported on, both at personal name level, and less personal Envelope Number or PIN number levels. A PIN Number, not unlike a banking PIN number, is used to finitely define a single person (Not a family) so that reporting and data entry can be done by people with NO way of telling exactly WHO they are entering data for! Envelope systems with numbers stamped on them can be used for the purposes of trackable giving. This is particularly useful when a specific project is in place, and people have promised a level of commitment. You can print out receipts and or reports showing giving for individuals against certain projects. This is very handy if you have a tax deductible building fund going or something of that nature that requires receipts. Setting Up Financial Projects Rather like the Weekly Statistics, you can setup Financial Projects in the settings area for use in Financial Records. With a setup like this, giving specifically to each of these areas can be tracked, reported and receipted to the giver if required. Data Entry in Financial Records Data Entry is based around a single or a series of single collection points on a single day. Multiple entries on the same day are not supported. (This is usually done around a Sunday service.) However further additional entries on other days can be utilized during the week for more donations received on other days. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 66

68 PRIVACY in Financial Records This is a very important issue in Pastoral Care records. Does the person entering the data into Pastoral Care need to know the name of the person donating? No they don t. If you use security to restrict the persons access to PIN number entry only, then the person doing the data entry will not be able to determine who gave the money, only the PIN number that the transaction be recorded against. This means that normal administration staff can accept donations / gifts against projects anonymously, even through direct deposit as long as the PIN number is quoted and the project quoted for assigning the money to! Reports On the reports tab, there are 6 reports that can be used to assist in management of the Financial Records area. They are listed below with their respective features. To run a report, simply select the report, and press Next. The steps required to produce each report will be presented to you. Report Name Use Data Required Total Analysis Pin Analysis People Analysis Receipts Pin Check List Name Check List Shows the total giving for a selected project, the average, smallest and largest single gift Shows the total amount given by PIN number for the selected project. Shows the total amount given by name (Names are printed on the report) for the selected project. You need to create your own Custom Receipt Report to be able to Print out a receipt for money received. Check list report for data entry or collection. Only shows PIN Numbers Prints names and PIN numbers in a check list format, useful for data collection. Date Range of available dates Date Range of available dates Date Range of available dates Date Range, selected people and selected custom receipt Custom Report design for Receipts In Custom report, there is a special report object for receipts. Use these to create a receipt in the format you require. This is to allow the church to add special information such as ABN Number, church address etc, and also Receipt Specific Information such as the date range, the amount etc. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 67

69 GOING FUTHER WITH GROUPS Every Church has groups! Groups are the backbone of Pastoral Care, such as: Status Groups Individual Groups Family Groups Ministry Groups Flexi Groups! Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 68

70 Tagging and Group Management Don t use the family editor to add participation data to people. If you have entered all your family information first, and left groups up to later, then bravo, this is the best way. If you have started putting group information against individuals using the family editor, and you are finding it a bit clumsy, IT IS! Let s check out Tagging Find this from the Main Menu Explore Tagging Tagging can be used for any of the following ideas, and more! Review Existing Groups Create New Groups Delete Old Groups Merge Groups together RAOK Random Acts of Kindness Random Reports Encouragement Letters Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 69

71 Notes To change your deacons after an annual general meeting when new deacons were elected, do the following: Use FILTERS to LOAD all deacons TAG ALL, then REMOVE the deacons from the status deacons Load all people Manually tag the new deacons names ADD THE TAGGED PEOPLE to the deacon s status! Simple Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 70

72 The Tagging Window Find this from the Main Menu Explore Tagging Use the tagging window to perform many different functions Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Select any filters to limit your view of people Press Load Tick people manually or all at once Do something to the ticked people! Functions you can perform: Add or Remove people from Status Groups, Individual Groups, Ministries, Individual Dates, Flexi Fields Output the selected people to ANY Pastoral Care Report including custom letters and custom reports. There are different tagging actions that can be done to the FAMILY, and to the INDIVIDUAL This is shown with 7 people tagged or ticked for processing. With the options selected in this example, the Process Button would mark each person as a Committed Attendee. You can also remove a state from a person by selecting the REMOVE option. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 71

73 PASTORAL CARE TRAINING Advanced 1 Training Notes : 3 Day Seminar Format Pastoral Care Training Notes, Full Day Training Pastoral Care Expanded SESSION 2 Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 72

74 CUSTOM STUFF! Pastoral Care as a host of built in reports. If you want to be time efficient, try and get used to these reports. Sometimes it s just not practical, and you need to design something yourself. We have 3 areas for this. Custom Letter, Custom Reports and Custom Directory Designer Custom Letter mail merge made easy Custom Report Design your own reports Custom Directory Designing your own simple church directories Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 73

75 CUSTOM LETTERS Mail Merge made easy Take the following items, and add them all together for a really easy and powerful mail merge facility. Filters Sorting Data Manipulation Formatting What If rules Rich Text Formatted Word Processor Then make that letter available as a template for future use! Custom Letters can be used to do the following: Send a get well card to all people who were sick and missed church last week Send a Welcome to our church letter to new people in your church Invite the entire church to the Sunday School Celebration End of Year party, and include a special couple of sentences in the letter just for the kids. (Don t print those sentences if there are no kids in the family) Send a cover letter to all people on the roster, letting them know that their contribution to the team is valuable and appreciated. (Naturally these are personalized letters by name!) the letters out, and print out any letters where people did not have an address! Send a letter to the. Group to invite them to a team meeting after church next week Let s Write a letter Let me show you how to write a letter. Let s write a letter to the team on the music roster, individually addressed, and tell them how much we appreciate their commitment to the worship ministry, and if they have children, let s include an extra sentence or two thanking them for the extra effort they go to being on the Worship Team when they have children as well. Step 1, write the letter, and right click whenever you want to insert a personlised field of data from Pastoral Care. Step 2, put in special content, using exclude filters around the sentences to exclude if no data exists between the filters. Step 3, Save and test. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 74

76 Step 1 Find this in Utilities Custom Letter Write the letter Step 2 Insert any fields that you need Pastoral Care to fill in for you. Simply Right Click on your letter to insert a field Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 75

77 Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 76

78 Excluding content based on MISSING data Notice the [R] around the second paragraph. This will exclude that paragraph if the field within the paragraph is missing data. You can exclude a single word, a sentence, paragraph etc. Saving Custom Letters When saving custom letters, use a Naming Convention to help sort the letters in the list of available letters. For example, start with a 3 letter grouping, followed by a dash, then a name that describes the letter. If you come up with standard conventions, it will help you sort them out. Here are some ideas: Tmp-Pastor-Welcome wor_rostercover grp_tennis_invite Temporary letter written by the pastor as a welcome letter Worship Team roster cover letter Group letter designed for tennis club invite to. If you start to use custom letters a lot, your naming convention and management of these letters will be important. Custom letters can be found in: C:\Pastoral_Care_Data\Pastoral_Care_12_Data\Letter You can use windows explorer to also manage these files, however, different folders that you might create under this location will not be visible to the Pastoral Care program. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 77

79 Formatting letters Use the toolbar in Custom Letter to set fonts, bold, alignment etc. Addressing Letters In our opinion, using a window face envelope is far easier than labels. All you have to do is to work out the best position for the address information ONCE, then save that custom letter, and call it LetterTemplate for others to use later on. It saves using labels, and in our opinion is faster. Downside, being efficient can be a little impersonal! So you really want to use address labels? Then setup your address label size in Settings Global Labels. Personal Hand Written Letters? There is nothing like getting a personal letter, but let s face it, there are too many people to write to most of the time! If it s going to be automated somewhat, don t worry that it looks automated, you can t help that! How about doing Hand Addressed letters, but the letters are printed? A nice personal touch. Getting the Surname Field right! If you are like most churches, then some people will have a different surname than their family name. For addressing purposes, you can use Individual Surnames when they exist by setting the appropriate SORT option when creating the report. Did I say report? Yes, a letter is a report, so you need to print them from the Create Reports area, or other areas that have the report area attached, for example, the Roll Program. Adding Graphics If you want to add a logo or letter head graphic, you can use the Image button on the Custom Letter Toolbar. For ultimate control on placement, use the Table to place text alongside your image if needed. If you use the IMAGE button on the toolbar, you can add an image anywhere you like! You can also use the mouse to re-size the image in place. Printing a Custom Letter Once you have saved your letter in the Custom Letter Writer utility, you will need to print it from the Create Reports area when you want to use it. This is where the power of filters, data and sort come into the equation. Using filters etc and combining them with your report creates the whole mail merge facility. Let s try out our letter that we made earlier. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 78

80 CUSTOM REPORT Just like Custom Letter, Pastoral Care can be used to create your own reports. Has anyone here tried to create a Custom Report? Was it easy? I expect the answer to be NO. And you would be 100% correct. It is not easy to create a custom report! However, Pastoral Care 13 is our easiest version to date, each version of Custom Report has been improved upon, and our latest version I must say takes the grrr out of writing your own reports. Almost all of Pastoral Care features are easy to use and understand, so why did we make Custom Report complex? The simple answer is, we did not design database reporting, the complexity in Custom Reports comes more from understanding report design in databases and reporting constraints in databases. Before you decide to create a custom report, ask yourself the following questions. Do I REALLY need to create my own report Is the style we have always used REALLY that important? Can I get the information I need in an existing report, and will that one do? Is the style we have always used REALLY that important? Is this an internal report that only church leaders may see, ie does the formatting matter that much? Is the style we have always used REALLY that important? I am sounding like a broken record here for a reason. You can spend countless hundreds of hours to use Publisher or Word to make a really swish looking church directory that is out of date in same time it takes for a 5 minute report to be out of date! OR you can use Pastoral Care to print a directory in minutes, yes minutes, and when it s out of date, print them again, in minutes. If you have no option but to stick with the current report style, try to create a custom report that is close to what you want. You will NEVER get it perfect, it is just not possible to get it perfect, trust me, I used to be an advanced database report writer earning a rather obscene amount of money per year doing what I did best, reporting from databases, and customers never got exactly what they wanted if they were graphically fussy.! HINT If your current Church Directory is done by hand in a word processor or graphics package, ANY database reporting tool will not be able to replicate it. It s the things that are manipulated by HAND that go against all rules of automation. A database is not an engine designed for finesse, it s designed to manage large amounts of data as efficiently as possible, to this end Pastoral Care Custom Report Writer has got as advanced as it will ever get for the end user. Let s create a few custom reports to see how they come together and how they work. Quote of the day Life is too short to get fussy with fonts! Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 79

81 Placing Objects on the Report When placing new objects on the Custom Report area, it is best to place all objects that you think you might use first, then shuffle them around. Otherwise Pastoral Care may start putting them in the way of your lovely design as you go, and it will become a bit annoying! Creating a church directory Without question, the most talked about reports are Church Directories. With privacy issues, graphic designers, historical pressures and color printing all coming together plus a host of other pressures, it s no wonder this is the single most complex task on the planet for the Church Administrator. Let s create a simple church directory, this is what I call, the Stress Free church directory. We can use Custom report for this, OR use Custom Directory Designer! STEP 1 Open up Custom Directory Designer from the Utilities menu. Place the following controls on the report design main area. (Just tick the stuff you want to see!) Surname Adults Names Combined Children s Names Address Family Details Personal Details The screen should now look something like this > Press Create! Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 80

82 Step 2 Click on each object, and move them around until it looks close to what you want. Then Double Click on each object to see formatting and display options for each report element. Notice the light blue area, this represents the Page Area of the report. In Custom Directory, there are no Page Headers, if you want to add Page Headers, use the Custom Report designer instead. When designing a report, you design only ONE family, or ONE individual. This is a report template that is repeated DOWN the page, the repeat space or vertical space a family / individual takes up is determined by the largest data taken up for each family / individual, and will vary from family to family depending on the size of the data displayed. Page options Press the Page button to see what options are available for page options. The default page layout is A4 paper. You can create your own custom page size by setting options here. Also available on Page Options are the following settings: Page Numbering Alphabetical Separators Lines between families (You don t need to draw one unless you need one in a particular position) Multiple Columns Miscellaneous Options Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 81

83 Custom Reports vs. Custom Directory Custom reports are far more powerful than Custom Directory. Custom Directory was created to make creating your directory simple and fast. This is for people who just want it done, and move onto the next job. Bravo! However, if you want to create something a little more complex, Custom Report is the area. What is available to output to custom reports Almost ALL information in Pastoral Care is available in Custom Reports. The main report as is, is designed for the base family data. (Note when designing a custom report for an individual output, the FIRST ADULT name is the object of choice for a first name of people, it will be the only name apart from surname that will be noticed by the report output process.) Sub Reports, What are they??? A sub report is a report that contains multiple instances of information for a single person. For example, the Status field can only be represented by a sub report. This is because the Status Field can have MANY entries for ONE person. Remember the Custom Report main template is designed for ONE PERSON or ONE FAMILY at a time. If you want to show other information other than Names, Address etc, then you will need to use a sub report. Let s create a new report and add a sub report. If we add in the SAMPLE status sub report, it will show up when we do a preview at the end of each family. We can use a Page Option to put a horizontal line between the families to make it clearer. I have highlighted a sub report object above. This is the sub report Within Data Section, meaning you can move it around and size it. To see what information that Sub Report can display, double click on it! The properties window to the right is added. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 82

84 Using Sub Reports Both types of Sub Reports (Within Data Section and at the end of the Data Section) are designed the same way. In Pastoral Care 13, there is a limitation of only one of the Sub Report within Data Section per custom report, and you can have up to 17 sub reports (A very long report indeed!) Use the tick boxes (Shown right) next to each report type and the Order Buttons to both select the Sub Reports you want to display, and set the order that you want them in. Note, that as a template, all custom reports and directories must obey the rules presented to them via Filters, Formatting, Data, Suppress etc. This means that you can further enhance a report beyond the template. Including most importantly, privacy and hidden data requests! Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 83

85 Combining your custom report with filters, a snap! Now you have created a custom report, how and where can I use it? Well you will be pleased to know that you can use it ANYWHERE in Pastoral Care where a report can be printed. These areas include: Create Reports Roll Program Tagging Manager How to share a custom report with another church! If you have created a custom report that you think is rather cool, and you want to share it with another church, just copy the report using windows explorer to an , and they can then insert it into the correct location for their version of Pastoral Care to use. Note, Custom Reports are version restricted, so a version 9 report will not work on a version 10 program etc. For Pastoral Care 13, the reports should be found in: C:\Pastoral_Care_Data\Pastoral_Care_13_Data\Custom For Pastoral Care 12, the reports should be found in: C:\Pastoral_Care_Data\Pastoral_Care_12_Data\Custom For Pastoral Care 11, the reports should be found in: C:\Pastoral_Care_11_Data\Custom For Pastoral Care 10, the reports should be found in: C:\Pastoral_Care_10_Data\Custom For Pastoral Care 9re, the reports should be found in: C:\Program Files\Pastoral Care 9re\Custom Naming Conventions Just like Custom letters, you should settle on a naming convention for your custom reports. As they all just end up in a list of reports, best to come up with some naming standards. Like Area_Author_Purpose Eg: TEMP_PASTOR_ContactList ADMIN_VICKI_PhoneList YOUTH_SAM_DutyOfCare If you stick to a standard, then the reports will be sorted for you in Pastoral Care where you can select them from. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 84

86 Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 85

87 ADVANCED FILTERING Let s have a look at some of the filtering and sorting options that will assist you further in the usefulness of Pastoral Care Filters Filters are the main area of interest in narrowing or widening a search for people to be included on your report or excluded from a report. Let s look at some examples of what can be achieved in the Filters area. Committed Attendee, but NOT an Elder All people in Home Groups Home Group 1 Only! All Adults (No Children) Find all people in a suburb Find all Occasional Attendees in a suburb Attendee AND+, Elder AND- (See sample below) OR+ on each home group OR+ on one home group MORE filters Adult/Child Filter OR+ on one suburb OR+ Suburb and Occasional Attendees Fitler for Committed Attendee, but do not include Elders To set this filter: Select ELDER Press AND SELECT Committed Attender Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 86

88 Press AND+ Note: Best catch all is the OR+ filter. Sort Sorting options are ideal for managing Mailing Labels, where you want to use perhaps those individual surnames that some people have, or mail to individual people instead of families etc. This area also allows you to sort the report output by a large range of fields. Note, almost ALL reports can be formatted as an Individual Report or a Family Report. Date Selection Using date based information you can filter your report for advanced date functions. Such as: Birthdate Find all people with a birthdate in March. Use the Month selection in the Date Search Criteria to find all people with a birthdate in a specific month. You could then have a standard Happy Birthday custom letter with a graphic in it, and a scripture of Encouragement that you can post to all people each month having a Birthday! Simply combine the Sort and a custom letter to achieve this. (Naturally this will only work if you have birthdate information stored in Pastoral Care! Age Find people who are between a certain age range, either in Birth Age Years or even Born Again years! Date Find all people who have a date within a specific period. Anniversary Enter a date range similar to date above, however this search finds the Anniversary of the date searched on. For example, select Birth Date, and an Anniversary range of 1/1/2000 to 1/1/2000 and the program will find all people with a birthday on the 1 st of January, in any year. (In anniversary search, the year component of the date is ignored) If you enter a Month, it is like the Month search for a date. The flexibility here is that you can search for even a week, and send out letters to people with a birthday in the next week! Date Not Exist Find all people who do NOT have any date information against the selected date. Ideal for tracking down people who need to give you their birthdate. You can combine this with a custom letter to post out to everyone who does NOT have a recorded birthdate, and ask them to provide you with one! Age Sensitivity Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 87

89 When entering a birthdate in the family editor, you can enter xxxx for the year. All anniversary type searches will still function. Format The Formatting area has heaps of options now all the one button of Formatting. Here is a list of the you can control in the formatting area: under areas Report Settings Titles, Page Breaks, Headers and Footers, Page Numbers, Alphabetical Formatting Report Title Setup report titles for continued use. Vision Settings for displaying the Vision Statement on reports. Logo Control a Logo or various logos for use on reports. Background Image Add an image to your page background. Text Watermark Add a Watermark to the background of each page. Field Formatting Force Upper, Lower and Sentence case on selected fields. Hidden Fields Enable printing of fields that have been selected in the family file as Hidden. Report Settings Titles, Page Breaks, Headers and Footers, Page Numbers, Family / Personal Conditions Titles, Page Breaks, Headers and Footers, Page Numbers, deceased Suppress Data Turn off or hide selected data. Ideal for taking a report that has too much information on it, and making it more concise. Portrait Settings for the use of photos on reports. These settings only work if a photo object is present on a report. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 88

90 REGISTRY MANAGER The Pastoral Care Registry Manager is a simple, and extremely useful program for recording: Funerals Weddings Baptisms Confirmations anything that your church wants to record in a registry. Legislative Registries There are of course legislated requirements for the recording of Funerals and Marriages. No Doubt your church has a registration book for Marriages if your pastor is registered to perform weddings. Pastoral Care is not designed to REPLACE a book entry, rather to assist in record keeping so it is easier to lookup later. Other Registries Baptisms are a popular event that can be recorded in the registry area. Particularly Infant Baptisms where the families participating in the event may not be regular church goers. Pastoral Care can use families and people within its database, and also random people not attached to or entered in your database, making it very powerful for recording of significant events. Setting Up the Registry Program Like all areas of Pastoral Care, setting them up is an important step. Go To Setup Registry to access the settings for this feature. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 89

91 Commitment Commitment types are events other than Funerals and Marriages. These two events are built in. Commitment Registry entries are events that you want to record. For example, Baptisms, Dedications etc. Location Enter the location / locations that are going to be used for any Commitment Event, or Funeral or Marriage. Officiating Person Enter the names of pastors, ministers, elders etc that may be officiating at any registry event. Sponsor Type This is a list of types of people that could be a sponsor for any registry event. This could be a Parent, Elder, Teacher, Leader, etc Funeral Directors Enter a list of Funeral Directors that are used in your area. Interment Location Enter the names of Cemeteries and Memorial Garden etc that are used for the interment of deceased people in your area. Registry Options The options here affect the default behaviour of the Navigation buttons and the Load button in the Registry Areas. Auto Save Tick Auto Save to set the program to save automatically. Navigation Options Set for the Next and Previous buttons to move either to the next event date, or the next Surname. Load Options Set the load button to either load in all data, or just the current year for each area in the registry program. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 90

92 Let s see it in action! Go to the Church tab and select Registry. The following screen is shown, with a number of toolbar options. View, Edit or Create a Commitment Registry entry View, Edit or Create a Wedding Registry entry View, Edit or Create a Funeral Registry entry Run a report on any Registry Area Create a new Registry Entry Save the currently displayed entry Delete the currently displayed entry. (Use Security to stop most people being able to delete a registry entry, there is Read Only access, and Full Control Access for this feature) Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 91

93 Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 92

94 PASTORAL CARE TRAINING Advanced 2 Training Notes : 3 Day Seminar Format Pastoral Care Training Notes, Full Day Training Pastoral Care Expanded SESSION 1 Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 93

95 MANAGER Can Pastoral Care DO very well??? The answer here is a resounding YES. Pastoral Care is a GREAT broadcast contact mechanism. But it is not designed like Microsoft Outlook. Pastoral Care has the manager to allow you to filter down to selected groups of people, and them a message. Think about the following tasks: Prayer Chain on Inviting people to a special meeting Notices, copy of sermons, studies etc to home group leaders Sending the minutes out to the management team Home Group Leaders about a training event The use of the Manager is limited only by your imagination. Can Pastoral Care replace Outlook? No it cannot, Pastoral Care does not receive s, and track conversations, and it s just not built for that. Settings Please have a close look at the settings in the settings area. (right) Delay is used to avoid your server being BLACKLISTED as a spammer. This can happen, and it s a nasty thing to get rid of, so avoid it at all costs! Tracking s are names & addresses that you want to send copies of communications to (selectable from the program) Using Security to enhance Pastoral Care If you use Pastoral Care security, and there really is no reason not to be using it, you can create return address s for each login into Pastoral Care. This will set the return address for the s to the address of the person logged on at the time. If security is not set, or the individual s are not set, then the global address (shown set above as MyChurch@bigpond.com) would be used as the return address. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 94

96 Sending s to groups of people Shown below is the main screen for the Manager. Note the FILTERS button, this is where you set the filters for the selected group of people that you wish to . To get ready for sending s, you need to do the following steps in order. Set any Filters using the Filters Button Choose the Load Options Adjust the Order to find options Press Load Compose the Add Attachments Tag people for the Press Send (Queue Delay or Queue Immediate) Queue If you have queued up some s and not sent them yet, you will see a warning on the front screen of Pastoral Care telling you that s are ready to be sent. Double click on the message to load the Queue manager and send your s. Data management for successful usage This is rather simple. To make management easy, firstly you need address information. Sounds easy doesn t it, well it s not too hard. Most people are happy to give out addresses, it s certainly easier than getting birthdate data! The next step is simply good group management. If you have good group management, status codes etc all in place, and address data, the rest just falls into place. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 95

97 SMS MESSAGING If you have being impressed with Pastoral Cares ability to report on groups of people, you will be even more impressed with its ability to send SMS messages to individuals or groups of people. Pastoral Care uses a web provider called SMS Global, and they currently provide SMS messages for 8 to 10 Cents per standard text depending on how many credits you purchase. Why Use SMS? SMS messaging is fast becoming, if not already become the choice of communication methods amongst young people. I have witnessed a group of young teens on a train sending texts to each other, and giggling at the texts, then responding All within 2 meters of each other! Why? They prefer text! Another reason to use text, the message is INSTANTLY conveyed to the receiver. If you send an , a person might not be at their desk, they may have an auto rule moving your into a folder for looking at later, your internet might not be working there are host of reasons why is not instant. If an comes in, it is unlikely to interrupt a person s current activity, if a text message arrives; it s not uncommon for a person to stop what they are doing, and look at their phone. What can I use SMS for? Here are just a few ideas Prayer Chain instant and readable to many people in a short time Meeting Reminders to staff A personalized and named Happy Birthday message on each church member s birthday automatically, ie: never forget a person s birthday! Library Manager Alerts Roster Commitment Alerts How much does it cost? Text messages are 08 cents each Credits are purchased in advance for use Credits NEVER expire No Lock In contracts No Monthly or Yearly account / maintenance fees Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 96

98 Before Using SMS You will need to create an account using the setup area for SMS. This is found from the main menu, click on the Settings Tab, then Global, then SMS. There is a Create Account button there that will start the process off. It is important to do this step first before attempting to use SMS or this feature will not work. Privacy Please be aware that some people treat SMS messages like Messages! IE: If an unsolicited SMS message arrives, it can be seen as unwanted, or SPAM. You might want to ask people permission to send the SMS messages, and use a Status of SMS_OK to filter for people who have agreed to receive SMS messages. Why SMS Global? We did extensive research into the many different companies and options open to us for SMS messaging. The reasons we have selected SMS Global are: Australian Provider Excellent technical support and service Fast Gateway (Average of 3.1 seconds to send a text) Great Features SMS to Voice & SMS to FAX for Australian Land Lines NO LOCK IN CONTRACTS! Free 25 text messages to get you started Credits pre purchased for text messages NEVER EXPIRE! Setting Up SMS messaging Go to Setup Global SMS. If you have already created an account with SMS Global, all you need to enter is the username and password. If you have not created an account, press the Create Account button! Your username for SMS is NOT an address, there is an automation Username and Password, this can be found in the account area on SMS global, look for API username and password. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 97

99 THE SMS Setup Screen. Press the Create Account button to be taken to the SMS Global website. (Note for New Zealand, account settings can be done from ) Tracking SMS This is the CC for text messages. Use this to send a text to your own mobile as a copy of what is sent. This is selectable from the SMS sending area. (This is not free! There is a cost for EVERY text message sent, even the copies!) SMS Etiquette Here are few pointers for SMS usage, and a few things to think about before sending out SMS messages. Text Messages have a more elevated level of importance and tend to interrupt our day more so than s Some people take text messages as SPAM, get permission to send alerts from church Some people might not understand text shorthand etc, be wary of using shorthand in your text unless you need to for economy sake Watch your SMS activity Watch your account costs, be aware of how much your staff are using this feature, its use can be limited by Security Settings Log into for account management tools, reports etc. Even get a listing of all outbound SMS messages that have been sent etc so you can occasionally audit the system. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 98

100 Using SMS from Pastoral Care Shown below is the SMS main screen, this is accessed from the Main Menu Explore Tab! HINT Use the Add Given and Add Surname options in the Compose Window (Shown Below) to insert a field into your text message. SMS Compose Window: Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 99

101 The SMS Toolbar Load people into the SMS program to select them for receiving a message Send your composed message to selected people Send a copy of the text message to one of your predefined tracking phone numbers Use Filters to load specific groups of people into the SMS messenger. Schedule Birthday Greetings to people on your database who have a birthdate recorded. View SMS messages in the Queue. Pastoral Care sends all messages to the SMS Queue so that your Pastoral Care session does not need to be interrupted. View the last 500 messages sent from Pastoral Care Test your text message to a manually entered phone number Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 100

102 LOAD The Load button will load all people in your database, or all people restricted by Filters. SEND Press this button to complete the sending of SMS messages to the selected people. Note, you will be notified of the expected cost with a confirmation screen before sending. TRACKING Press this button to show the Tracking Window. Here you can select who you want a copy (CC) of the message to go to. Note, Tracking SMS names and phone numbers are set up in Settings Global SMS. Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 101

103 BIRTHDATE Press this button to load the Birthdate Screen. From here you can schedule Pastoral Care to send out a text message to all people having a birthdate within a selected date range. Steps required to perform this function are: Select the From and To date range. All people who have a birthday within this period will be LOADED into the SMS Manager, and the SMS Manager will be put into Scheduler Mode Select the time of day to send the message. Please note, Messages are sent at a time based on AEST. (Australian Eastern Standard Time) If you are not sure, try a test one, setup a dummy person with a birthdate and your mobile, then try the dry run just with them! Select an AGE FILTER if you want to limit the message to a specific age range. This is useful if you want to send messages that are worded differently for different age ranges. We recommend leaving the Do Not Load... tick box TICKED to avoid accidentally scheduling birthday greetings more than once. Note: The Birthday Greetings are sent directly to SMS Global for scheduled sending. You must keep your account in credit enough to cover scheduled text messages, as these are only billed when they are sent. At present, you cannot cancel or retract scheduled text messages. Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 102

104 SAVE & RETRIEVE The Save and Retrieve buttons in the Compose SMS Message area lets you Save a text message as a template and load (Retrieve) a saved text message later for re-use. HISTORY The History button loads a screen that shows you (up to) the last 500 text messages sent. The History window not only tells you what the message was, but also how much it cost to send, and lists all the people and their phone numbers that the message was sent to. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 103

105 LOG The Log Button on the History Window opens a log window that has important information for fault finding SMS messages. You may find some of the information shown in the log useful when having discussions or conversations with SMS Global in relation to tracking missing messages etc. It will be a rare event that causes any serious problems, however this feature is provided for just that circumstance. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 104

106 TEST The Test Icon lets you take your text message out for a test drive. This allows you to send the currently composed SMS message to a single manually entered phone number. As well as testing an SMS to make sure it formats OK and you are happy with it before sending to many people, you can use this to manually send a single SMS message to one person. Note Test SMS messages are not recorded in the History area. TAX INVOICES To get a tax invoice for your expenditure on SMS messages, just log into your SMS account. From that web page, you will be able to access copies of Tax Invoices provided by SMS Global. Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 105

107 ROSTERS Introducing Rosters Why the picture of an Air Traffic Controller? Well if you were directly involved in Air Traffic Control, I mean Rosters, hmmm, well you would know that at least an air traffic controller has computers, radar, constant contact with all affected people and backup staff to assist him! Relief is at hand, we now have a computer program written by a great programmer with the direct input of a person who was directly involved in producing a rather complex roster for a large worship team, me! Is it worth the effort (or just how much time can you save) If you use a Roster managed on a custom database program, or an Excel spreadsheet, then please change to using Pastoral Care. There is a significant investment in learning to master the Roster Program, however it can save you not only countless hours, but also there is much money to be saved in not having to purchase Aspirin or other popular pain killers! Yes, Rosters cause headaches. I know, I was one person of a team of 2 who did rosters for my home church, and it did cause great headaches, not just for us, but also for those whom had the joy of our rosters inflicted upon them! One of the greatest savings for ALL people involved is the number of phone calls needed to produce a roster will be radically reduced. Well how much time can I save you ask? We had a music team consisting of Piano, Drums, 2 Guitars, Flutes, Violins, Percussion (in addition to drums) brass, backing singers and praise leader. This team had: 4 Pianists 5 Guitarists 2 Drummers 2 Percussionists 2 Flutes 3 Violins and a cello 12 backing vocalists rotating in teams of 3 6 praise leaders on rotation In addition to this we also had to roster 2 Techo s from a team of 6, 2 people for communion setup from a team of 30, 2 people for greeting from a team of 26 and the preaching roster from internal and external sources. Sunbury Baptist Church did have a rather complex roster need. When we were using Excel and Brain Power, it took 2 people about 16 hours to get 3 months of rosters done, including many hundreds of s and phone calls to check availability, clashes etc. Than about another 4 hours of reworking after the roster was released, before it was finally released again. If you put a modest hourly rate of say $15 per hour for those resources, and add in the phone calls etc, this came to a staggering $600 per 3 months. It s a good thing we work with volunteers! Hands up to tell me how you do rosters now any Excel Spreadsheets, notes, manual methods etc? Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 106

108 After using Pastoral Care, our first roster took us about 4 hours for 2 of us to produce for 3 months, our second roster took about 2 hours to produce, and our third roster down to under 1 hour. In fact, if you fully trusted Pastoral Care to generate all roster positions without manual intervention, and this is possible, your roster could take you as long as 15 minutes for a 3 month roster! Yes!!!! As long as 15 minutes! You can tell I m impressed, I am rather proud of the roster program, as it was modeled around Sunbury Baptist Church where I hail from, and tested there on its maiden voyage. Blame the Computer, it has no feelings If you use Pastoral Care to do your rosters, you can deflect those hurtful comments off your back with Sorry, the computer did it, I ll look into for the next roster Pastoral Care rosters look different to mine, what do I do? This is a simple answer, use our format! There are two different ways of presenting rosters, Dates down the side with tasks across the page, or dates across the page with tasks down the side. Henry Ford when asked What colors will your T Model Ford come in replied You can have Black, Black or Black!. We humbly suggest you choose black! In other words, the final outcome is similar, but the difference in effort required can be enormous. Pastoral Care produces an easy to read roster personalized for individuals or families, in less than one hour. I hope I haven t oversold this feature to you, but this one area that can really save you heaps of time and effort. Pastoral Care rosters can sometimes be accused of using too much paper, them in PDF, its an automatic built in feature, for those that use a little too much paper, it s a balance from the hours spent using brain power, electricity, phone calls s etc to do a manual one, we still reckon our rosters are friendlier to the environment! Save Time! We don t have much of it I had discussions with a church that really wanted dates across the top, and duties down the side. I pointed out how easy it is, they still wanted dates across the top. They ended up using Pastoral Care to create the roster, print it out, then manually type it into a spreadsheet re-formatted with dates across the top! Life is too short for this! Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 107

109 Before using rosters, Think, Think, Think Did I mention think! You really need your head around your roster requirements before you jump in and start using Pastoral Care rosters. One way of playing with it is to take a copy of your data onto another computer and play with that while your team that currently rosters still produces rosters the old way. Gather as much information as you can about ANY regular patterns in peoples rostering. For example, a shift worker may only be available on say the 1 st Sunday of the month. Some people might have a preference for certain days (never on the 5 th Sunday etc) Patterns in attendance are surprisingly common for many people, and these can be easily accommodated, and will add a level of automation that will bring a smile to your face once it s all going! Then start listing all of the duties (tasks) that need to be rostered. There are a lot of them when you really think about it. Here is a list for Sunbury Baptist Piano, Drums, Guitar 1, Guitar 2, Flute, Strings, Brass, Vocal, Technical, Leader, Communion Setup, Communion Leader, Offering, Morning Tea, Greeting and Security. You could easily add other tasks for bigger churches After you have done this, start thinking about your services. Do they have distinctively different teams? Do the same teams do all services on a Sunday. Do you roster a team of people or groups of individuals differently each Sunday? Is every Duty on Every Event? NO, what about Christmas Day, Good Friday etc.. These can all be preprogrammed for duties required. Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 108

110 Setting Up Rosters Making Roster Setup easy Here are a few insider tips on getting rosters working well. Create Status s that match roster duties. Or at least groups of duties, such as Worship Team, Admin Team, Leadership team. If you have many people that do particular duties, then create duty based status or duty based individual groups. For example, Pianist, Guitarist, Vocals etc. With less people you can be a bit more generic, such as Musician, Setup, Technician etc. If your roster is large, think about splitting the roster across sections, such as Musicians/Worship, and everything else. Order the duties in your master setup logically, and grouped by themes. Eg, start with Leaders, then musicians, then welcomers, setup people etc. Ordering them nicely will assist in selection in the process of producing rosters and reports. Use the Roster Event in the master setup area to really define all events you are planning on. Include such events as Good Friday, Christmas Day, and Christmas Eve etc. Whatever services or events you NORMALLY run, they need to be setup first. Remember that EVERY duty you setup may or may not be available to all events. For example, you may never do communion on Christmas Day! So you do not have to have communion configured for that event! Don t forget to set the Duty Pattern for every event. For example, communion setup may only be on the 1 st and 3 rd Sunday of the month, you can program this in the master setup, that way Pastoral Care will ALWAYS put people on communion only when needed. You must set the Maximum Amount of people or teams for every duty. The default is 1, however, if you need 3 vocalists, then set max amount to 3. Pastoral Care will then ALWAYS try and roster 3 people for every time you ask for vocalists. Or you can set up a team, and use teams for auto build of rosters. Naming Conventions For ALL setup areas for rosters, use the shortest possible name. If you have more than 5 duties, then you don t want a duty name for Morning Tea Preparation when M-Tea may well do! You will see that there are options for short names for people as well, and the more you can squeeze onto the roster grid, the better it will be. (Potentially) Some of you may need more than one roster report to fit it all on a page. Preparation is the key to success As pointed out, preparation is everything in this area. Once you have mastered Rosters, and it may take 3 or 4 roster runs to really start getting the hang of things, then you will reap the rewards of this great feature. Trust the roster program, it is easier than trusting your own mind If you are confident of the rules you have entered, you can be confident in the roster. A lot of work has gone into this feature to make sure it is accurate and reliable. A new feature usually takes between 2 6 days for us to create, and double that for documentation. The Roster Feature took us 7 weeks to create, and more than double that to document it in the manual and the helps etc. Write it down! Once you have mastered rosters, create a document to record the process for the next person. This is critical in building in continuity, and not making more work for the next person Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 109

111 Is it really worth that much effort? If you produce a roster at all in your church, you are already trying to make all the decisions in your head. Things like Is it communion Sunday this week?, Sorry John, I forgot you were away this week etc etc. All the decisions to make in Pastoral Care must be made any way to produce a roster, so why not have some help? Ok, I want to use the roster program, how does it work? The roster program simply takes a number of rules for events, duties and people, and puts it all together on a roster. The power is in the rules. Rules like: How often should an event run When does it run, what days etc What duties (tasks) are required for that event Who is not available for that event and for what duties, is the whole family not available? Who is assigned to those duties Has that person been on too many times this month? Does Fred work well with Mary? Helena and Fran always want to do Kitchen together because they are best friends, and they take turns driving each other to and from church Did this person lead worship on the last day of the last roster? If so, let s make sure we start with someone else Once Pastoral Care has all your rules, it can Auto Build your roster for a selected date range. You can then load the roster into a preview grid where you can tweak it for final release. Tweaking is simple, and very powerful as you will see. The order of things! Pastoral Care uses both logical assignments and random assignments to produce a roster. The trouble with random is that a truly random solution will not look random to the naked eye! A truly random result may put a person on piano 3 weeks running, and not again for 6 weeks, this is possible using random code generation, however it does not look random, or fair! So mostly, Pastoral Care uses logic. A part of this logic is the order of items and people in lists. WHEREVER you see the sort arrows shown here, you are able to move people or things around in lists. This will affect to some extent how Pastoral Care selects people and items for rostering. Loading people using filters This is an obvious advantage, when you load people into the roster program, you can load them by groups or status, then work on them according to that feature you selected. Load all muso s to work on them first, or leaders to create the preaching roster etc. Loading people is essentially the first step after setup has been done, after loading people, you can assign them to duties. This is the logic of using filters, load musicians, assign musicians, load vocalists assign vocalists. You can also create teams of people for re-use. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 110

112 Traps for new players! Don t forget to select the Roster Event that you are working on at the top of the Roster Window. If you do not select the event that you intend to work on, you may accidentally muck up the settings on another event! As a general rule, all properties for roster items such as people and duties are specific to the unique combination of Event and Duty, and also the combination of Event, Duty and Individual. Duty Participation (Or who's on first?) This is the who s who of your roster. Who does what, but not when! Assign Participation by Team or Individuals? You can do either Individuals, or Teams or a combination of both. A team is a defined set of people that ALWAYS participate together in one duty. These are particularly useful for a Band, or a Choral Group etc. The Roster report that people get will show team names instead of people s names. The Team Members can be optionally printed out at the end of the roster grid report. Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 111

113 Adding People to a Duty Select Participants on the Roster Toolbar, and either use Add Participants Method 1, or Method 2! We like Method 2 for an all over look, or you can use Method 1 that adds sorting to the list as well. Participation Properties These properties can greatly enhance the auto build, and they need due consideration and thought to assist you in creating the perfect roster! Each person can have their own properties effecting how they are assigned to an event. The order of people in this list will affect the priority that people are selected in when Auto Building a Roster. Place your most experienced people towards the top of this list. Substitute text allows you to put a nick name or short name in for a person. This text can be printed on the rosters in place of a name. Set the Frequency to force a minimum break in events. Eg: Set this to 2, and the selected person will have a minimum break of 2 dates (usually weeks) between events. If you set a frequency of one, this will force Pastoral Care to place that person very high on the priority order and the person may be rostered on every event. Set the Maximum Amount to limit the absolute maximum number of times a person can be rostered on for the selected duty for the entire date range built Add "& Family" Tick this to set Pastoral Care to add the words "& Family" to a person in a roster grid report. Useful if a whole family is to be rostered on. Simply assign Dad or Mum, and tick the Add Family button. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 112

114 Absence Pastoral Care does really care when someone is available for a duty! Really, we are more interested in when they are not available. It s much faster and less data to collect to say When are you not here? This may be the most significant change in the way you do rosters, and it is a little scary letting Pastoral Care take over, but feel confident the worst that can happen is the experiment failed, and you have to revert to your old method while re-thinking. To make data gathering easy for Absence, we suggest that you build rosters of around 3 month s duration. Not too short to avoid too much administration, and not too long so you are not able to change things around that are not working for you. For Absence, you need to find out who will not be available during the roster period, and if there are any patterns to their absence. Pastoral Care allows for one off absent periods, or patterned absent periods. The one offs are great for I m going on Holidays for 3 weeks the pattern absent periods are great for shift workers, or people with other regular commitments. Shown above is the Absence feature. Found of course under Participants. Use this to control the absence of the selected person. There are 2 additional features here that are not often noticed. Copy and Review. Use Copy to copy an absence to more than one duty / event, and use the Review Button to show a list of dates that the selected person is marked absent for. This allows you to review that what you have set up as a pattern is what you intended to setup. Important, in the above example, Marion has a regular absence for Door Duty. They may also be not available for other duties, use the copy/clear button to copy absence data to other duties and events etc. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 113

115 Association This feature is the Russell Barker Memorial Feature. No, I m not dead, but this feature was created for me! It turns out that a lot of people enjoy this feature. Association is the term we use to describe a desire to always work with a particular person, or never work with a particular person. We used to have a praise and worship leader that I struggled terribly with to get along. They did not really appreciate the role of a single pianist, or a lead pianist in a group, and they also did not really comprehend that a key change from C to Ab whilst changing from 4/4 to ¾ was NOT SMOOTH, and really would not work. Hence this feature served as a tool to keep us from constant stress. Other great uses other than harmony for the Association feature are: Mum and Dad with kids, don t associate them together as one of the parents needs to be with the kids! Some people travel together and therefore it is more practical to roster them on together Some people just click! They should be together! Some people just don t click! Keep them apart Any other reasons to keep people together, or apart! Association can be found on the Participants button on the toolbar Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 114

116 Creating Events with Dates Once you have added in People with Duties, Teams, absent and association rules, the very last thing before lift of is the Dates! Dates can be created for your roster period by a number of pattern methods, and individual dates. Dates must be created for each and every event that you want in your roster period. If you are running 4 services a day, then 4 roster events with dates will need to be created, along with any additional extras such as special services, Easter, Christmas etc. You can Build a Date Range from scratch, build a single date, or replace a date range. Replace a Date Range How cool is this! If you have say a 3 month roster, and you are absolutely happy with it, and want to use it again, go ahead, just shift the dates! The ONLY thing going wrong with this idea is absentee clashes. Are people away during the shifted date range. Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 115

117 Auto Build! What, Pastoral Care can build the roster???? To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer. What a great quote. This is not attributed to anyone, but it does help us in rostering. It s one thing to admit a mistake, however it can be MUCH easier to blame the computer, after all it has no feelings! Well this little diversion does have something do to with auto build! If you can imagine the effort required to remember everyone s availability, personal preferences, holidays, what they like to do etc, remember that communion is never on the 5 th Sunday of the month, or ONLY on the 5 th Sunday remember that Mrs Jones can only work in the kitchen when Heather Barker is on because Heather drives her to church, remember that Carl cannot do security lockup because. Well you get the picture. Let s just have a big green button called GO. Our big green button is called Auto Build, and if you are game, it can build your roster for you. We are using auto build at Sunbury Baptist Church, although we do NOT let it choose the preaching roster, it s a bit more complex, we do however let it choose all other tasks, and there are plenty of those to manage. Shown below is the Build Window. This is where you set all the preferences before you press the GO button! This is laid out in 4 easy steps, Events, Duties, Dates and lastly options. Step 1: Roster Events If you have dependency rules that cross events, then you should build all events at the same time for maximum automation accuracy Step 2: Duties Select the duties that want to build. Not all need to be selected, but for absolute trouble free rostering, why not take the plunge and press Tag All You can also prioritise the more important (I prefer the term Strategic) duties higher up in the build so that people are assigned there first. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 116

118 Step 3: Dates Select your date range to build. Please note, that Dates would have needed to be built already for the selected events. In the date selection area, you can choose to consider the past, this allows the auto build to look back x number of weeks and give other people a go first! Step 4: Options Press the options button to see the following window. Well we have all the preliminary stuff done, the rest is easy Let s press Auto Build! Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 117

119 After the Dust is settled After the roster has been built, no doubt you will need to scan over it (look over the computer s shoulder!) and tweak it a bit. This is a part of the computer showing you how it thinks, and you can adjust your rules as you learn more about how Rosters tick! Shown below is the tweak window, it s called View. The Full View is shown, however you can hone in on an individual person by using Personal View. Notice the Highlight feature and the Duplicates Features. These help you ascertain the level of saturation a person has on the roster, and also if someone is rostered onto more than one duty at one event. Not always a problem by the way, but can be Features on this window that allow you to tweak with confidence Double Click on a cell to change people, or add comments Use Find Duplicates for highlighting clashes You can press auto build again! There is no need to stick with this roster. Feel free to change some rules and settings. Remember, if you can create a rule or condition to control a problem, then that setting will stay with you and help you in the future You can Auto Build one or 2 duties only if you like, or one event etc. Use roster event and date filters to limit your review process to smaller more manageable chunks Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 118

120 Roster Reports Now that you have created your roster, the only thing left to do is to distribute it. There are so many options here for reporting, we will just go through a few variations on the screen, and you can see what works best for different scenarios. The main things to consider when producing a roster are: Total Roster or Personalized Family or Individual formatting for personalized All Events and duties, or selected events and duties or Print distribution Splitting up your roster It may be extremely nice to have a roster that fits 12 months of rostering on a single A4 page, but unless you have only on pianist, and 6 people in your congregation this is not going to be practical. Consider splitting up your roster into any of the following sections / combinations Duty Sections, such as Admin (Car Park Attend, Security, Welcomer, PA, Tech etc) and Praise Team (Muso s Singers, Leaders etc) Other logical groups could be Catering, Band, Choral, Back Stage etc Months Find the best mix of months, could be 1 month, 2, 3, 4 etc Events, maybe a single roster for AM1 service, or for AM2 etc. If there is cross over (people in one service also serving in the next) this may not work for you as well Or a combination of any of these WHY SPLIT UP A ROSTER? The only practical reason is fitting it on an A4 page. We try to keep the roster to an A4 page, Landscape, Even number of pages. Even pages because we use a double sided A4 Laser Printer that prints double sided, we don t want to mix up the personal rosters! SAVE THE TREES! Rosters can produce a large number of pages to print, that s why we like . Although most people will print it out at home, so start up the chainsaws anyway. You may want to consider a general church roster grid and put it up on the web site (behind a simple login screen for privacy) Personalised Rosters These are the BEST. A roster grid for Russell Barker, with his events and dates HIGHLIGHTED. It s a breeze to produce, and easy to read. Watch this Family Rosters Just like Personalized, these are family highlighted. A nice variation on a theme. ing Rosters This is the best feature, just to everyone, if you are ing, and some people do not have s, Pastoral Care will AUTOMATICALLY print out their roster with their name(s) at the top of the roster. Just hand the excess out at church next week, or post them off in the mail. What about people without address information See above! Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 119

121 Using Multiple Rosters for different sections of Church Of course rosters are not just limited to the Main Worship service, what about: Bible Study Leaders, mix them up around the fellowship! Other Services, Christmas Day, Christmas Eve, Sunday School Celebration Night Visitation Roster Prayer Meeting Roster Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 120

122 THE ROLL PROGRAM The Roll Program can be found from the Church Tab on the main menu. The purpose of the roll program is to record the attendance or otherwise of Individual People at specified meetings / events. This is not designed for summarized statistics such as how many people on average attended the morning service, it is more accurately designed for precise attendance statistics based on individual attendance. This creates for some churches, and enormous task of data collection, and is not for the faint hearted. However, I know of some churches that collect that sort of data and don t really use it for any benefit / purpose. Here are a few ideas on what the roll program can do for you Post a copy of the Church Newsletter to people who missed church Empower a small group leader to call people who missed their home group this week Invite all of your fringe dwellers to a barbeque at the church Better understand the attendance habits of your church Understanding Roll Projects In the Setup Area of the roll program, there are roll projects. A roll project can have up to 7 services or events. Most churches may only use one roll project. A roll project is not designed to split people into regulars or non-regulars, but rather more strategic groupings. For example, roll projects could be called: Church Services Home Groups Bible Studies Youth Under Church Services, you might have AM1, AM2, Evening, MidWeek Under Home Groups, you might have Smiths, Grahams, Whites Under Bible Studies, you might have Youth1, Elderly, YA (Young Adult), NW (Newly Weds) etc This is of course if you really want this sort of information captured and entered. Is a roll take at a Bible Study going to put some people off? Remember, many people can be rather sensitive to this sort of data collection, and in a small group, it may be difficult to avoid people knowing that a roll is taken each meeting. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 121

123 To record or Not to record, that is the question Small churches with less than 70 people at any one service. Noticing who was not there is pretty easy, no software really required. Data entry will take about 10 minutes. Medium churches, around 100 people at any one service. These are easy to administer for a roll, in fact a good leadership team could almost do this in their head almost. Data entry will take about 15 minutes. Large churches, 250 plus people, ideal for Pastoral Care, makes the job so much easier, capturing data is not too hard, should take no more than 30 minutes for data entry. Really Large churches, 500 plus people, not so ideal for Pastoral Care, does make the job of managing people so much easier, but capturing data is more difficult and data entry will be around 60 minutes for data entry. The more valuable the information is, the more work is involved in capturing the data! Capturing Data VS Data Entry These are TWO very different tasks. Capturing the data requires people who know Everyone! These people can scan the congregation, or watch people come in and tick them off the tick list. Data Entry requires a person with strong computer skills, and a mind for detail to enter the data. Rapid data entry If you have used a Pastoral Care tick list, AND the people not ticked are not at church, then use the same filters that created your tick list to load into the roll program (usually just all people). Then mark EVERYONE as attended, then go through the list and redo those who were away. One upside to this is that if you slip up, you probably assumed that a person was there, better that than a letter saying we missed you last week that was sent to one of your elders, who preached! You can program a function key for an attendance, press and hold till all people are in, then use another function key for absent, sick, unknown etc. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 122

124 Setting Up the Roll Program To setup the roll program, go to Settings Roll. In this area you can set up your roll projects, and then each service or event under the roll projects. Absent Codes in Roll Projects Each roll project can have absent codes. These are used to mark people off against a roll project. They are either there or not, and if not there, then you can record why they are not there. Here are a few suggestions as to some practical absent codes Absent Sick Holiday Other Commitment Unknown Remember these are reasons people may not be at an event! Include as full attendance if Tick these options if you want to consider a person as actually attending if they are for example on Holidays. The logic here is, you assume that they would ordinarily be attending if they were not on Holidays, so tick this option to let Pastoral Care ignore their holidays as an absent code, and just pretend that those people on Holidays were actually at church. Using Technology for Data Entry Pastoral Care has now included bar code scanning for use in the roll program. But before you suggest getting a bar code tattooed on everyone s forearm, there are a few problems with this Most people will object to this method, and secondly, a bar code on the arm does not scan all that well! Well of course I was only kidding; the forehead is a much more reliable spot! Barcodes for Children Here is the best idea ever for kids. Make name tags for all children, make it a part of entry that they have a name tag (Even new comers, make up a temporary name tag). On the back of every name tag, stick a bar code for each child. Pastoral Care can PRINT bar codes, or better still, print a name tag with a bar code on the front of the name tag, kids are hard to offend! When the children leave an event (such as Sunday School) get them to throw their tags in a bucket. There you have it, instant data collection in a bucket. It s a simple process to scan all the children in for Sunday School. If the data entry person picks up a name tag from the bucket, and it does not have a bar code, then they are new! (You will need a process for capturing the data for entering new kids into the database.) Barcodes for Adults Names tags might work, but most adults are not like most children. You can print a bar code check list that you tick people off as you observe them (from a distance!) the data entry process can then be as simple as scan all barcodes with a tick next to them. Here is a little hint, don t let people see your bar code reports, they can be a bit sensitive to this type of automation. They feel that they are reduced to a number, we know we care about the person, the number is all about being accurate and timely in the use of our most precious resource our time! Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 123

125 Super-Efficient Data Capture and Entry An Australian Company is working on a wireless / blue tooth enabled windows box that can automatically record attendance into a data file for importing into Pastoral Care. How??? Bluetooth! Create a unique individual ID based on a Bluetooth phone or PDA etc. then when the person comes within cooee of an antenna, bang, they are recorded as being there! This is very new technology, probably a bit expensive for smaller churches, and the only main downside we see is that you may capture only up to 60% of your congregation, the rest of the sorting and data entry would be by hand. Don t offend for efficiencies sake! You could use the roll program to post everyone who missed last Sunday an offering envelope so that they can play catch up with their tithe the next time they are at church! Seriously, have a good long think about auto responders like the roll program, they can be very efficient, and very impersonal. We built it to empower you with the information, before sending a custom letter in a window faced envelope, be sure the message is heartfelt, and you would not be offended if your received it in the mail! Bar Code Entry As previously mentioned, barcodes can be extremely efficient, and extremely offensive at the same time. Even if you introduced bar coded name tags for every church attendee along with a great awareness program explaining the great efficiencies that can be achieved with this sort of technology, I wouldn t be surprised if a great majority of people would object to that level of automation. However there are some easier ways to use barcodes that do not need to offend the general population at church. Bar Code Reports Using a bar code report, you can create a roll tick off report to simply tick people off as you see them. Next to each name is a bar code, this bar code is NOT used during church, rather it is used later. The data entry process is simple, go down the list and Scan the people in who have a tick next to their name. Then all that remains is what to do with the remainder. Put in sick for those who you know are sick, then absent everyone else! Job done. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 124

126 Sunday School rolls - becoming extremely strategic Sunday School, Junior Church, Kids Club, Scouts, Guides, Boys Brigade etc. All of these events have one thing in common, KIDS + Working With Children. In Queensland, an organization must be able to account for WHO had contact with WHAT CHILDREN, WHEN and WHERE and for how long. Just think about how much work that is, then heave a sigh of relief that you don t live in Queensland! Still, the day will come I believe when the WWC legislation will become too I important and strategic to manage for State Legislation to cope with, and it will be escalated to Federal Level. It will only take ONE pedophile to slip through one State System for Federal Government to say This is too important to have different rules, let s make this a Federal Legislative scenario. Think about starting the Name Tag idea for kids, it s a great tool that can be used for encouragement etc. I know one church that has reward points for kids. They earn points for coming each Sunday, learning Bible Verses etc, and prizes are awarded for outstanding kids. (Everyone gets a prize at the end of every year, some get extra recognition for the extra points) A roll program for the children can be used for reporting the attendance record over the year of each child. Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 125

127 Let s do a Roll for Sunday AM Steps for creating a roll. Step 1: Gather your information Using whatever method suits you, gather your data. We suggest a tick list produced by Pastoral Care. These can include a bar code for quick scanning of people. Step 2: Start the Roll Program Start the Roll Program Choose a Roll Project Enter a date for saving a new record Use Filters to load all the people expected at the church service. Most practical for doing Group rolls, such as Youth Group, Bible Studies etc. Step 3: Select entry method and go for it! Choose a method of data entry (Keyboard, Mouse, Bar Code) Set options for the data entry method selected Enter your data! Adjust data as you go! Save and commit the roll to the database Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 126

128 ROLL REPORTS Using roll data for good! As discussed briefly before, roll information can be rather sensitive to people who attend your church. The more sensitive the issue, the more likely it is that those people don t attend very often, or are not core people in your church. This is a general rule, and there are always exceptions to general rules! In other words, people who do not like being counted are usually people who are away the most! Having said that, as a leadership team, it can be very interesting analyzing your roll attendance data in detail, it often leads to unexpected results. For example, if I asked you does the bulk of your church attendees come at least 90% of the time? Would you agree with that, or maybe only 80% of the time? Perhaps 70% of the time? In many churches only 20% of the congregation attend church over 70% of the time! You may be surprised to know this statistic, or you may not be surprised, it all depends on how informed you are. The bigger the church, generally the less informed you are due to the expediential increase in effort to be informed! Did you notice that??? The more people you have, the more effort there is involved in knowing what s going on in your church! You might say that this an obvious observation, but not many churches really resource themselves well enough to really manage all of the church congregation. Encourage not discourage your fringe dwellers This is where the roll program can really help. It can help you target your efforts of looking out for people to those people who don t attend all that often. (If that is a strategy that you want to endorse as a leadership team.) By doing a detailed roll, you can easily become aware of the people who don t come very often. These people may be transient members who regularly go to different churches for different reasons shift workers (Do you know who are shift workers in your church) regular visitors! Yes there are such a thing, for example, Grandma and Grandpa visit church often to see the grandkids whose parents are members of your church or they may be genuinely in need people, whose first sign of struggling in their life, or their Christian Walk is a drop off in church attendance. BE CAREFUL how you use the data, custom letters can be very efficient, and also rather impersonal. One practical way an absentee type report can be used is to create a mailing list to post out a copy of the church bulletin to every family who missed church last week. No we missed you words necessarily needed, perhaps just at a minimum, We noticed you were not at church last week, here is a copy of the newsletter, or even just the newsletter, no words needed! It says without saying, we missed you, because we were bothered to mail you a newsletter, even include a CD of the sermon??? Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 127

129 We missed you last To achieve such a report, the following steps can be taken. Click on Roll Reports Choose Attendance Choose Search by Attendance or Absence Double Click on Search By Attendance Select a date from and to Select the Absent Reason Select Match All Dates with Any Selected Attendance Select an Output Report and press Continue Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 128

130 HINT If there are too many people printed out, and some you don t want to send the letter too, don t get too stressed and try to fix the report with filters etc, just destroy the letters that you don t want and send out the remainder. Sending a welcome letter to newcomers, can it be done? Yes a welcome letter can be sent to newcomers, just one problem, who are they, and where do you send it to? If you have a method of capturing new attendees, and their address information, it follows that you can send a welcome letter to them. Here are the steps to achieve this: Step 1 Capture name, address information 2 Enter them as a family record in Pastoral Care, give them a family group of NewComers 3 Use the roll program reports area to find all people who attended last week (opposite of who was away) 4 Use filters before running the report to limit the output to newcomers. 5 Print out a custom letter welcoming them to your church 6 Don t forget to untag the family as newcomers once they start coming regularly! Who are my committed attendees? You may well believe that you know your committed church attendees, however, with the roll program, you can really get a good picture of who comes how often! Use the Percentage Report to find the people who attended church over a period of time between a range of percentages. For example, find all people who attended between 80%-100% of the time in the last 20 weeks. You may be very surprised to find that only a very few people achieve such a high percentage Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 129

131 Trending Report Use the Block Analysis to find out the percentage attendance of people in blocks of say 4 weeks at a time. This is useful in seeing attendance patterns over say a 4 week period, and comparing that to the previous 4 week period etc. Last Entry Records Reports Use this report to simply show the names of everyone in the report along with the last date a roll status was recorded, and what that status was (attendance or absence code) You can combine this report with filters to narrow down the report to a smaller group Last Absence Find the last time a person was absent, and show the date and absent reason for each person. Last Record Show all information recorded on the last recorded roll entry. Attendance Record up to 41 weeks This is a quick report that looks back up to 41 weeks from the selected date and shows a string of attendance data for each person for each week. Very quick and easy to read, and shows at a glance the number of services each person has attended and the absent days for each person. Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 130

132 VENUE BOOKING Many churches have great facilities. Some of us have had large churches that have expanded over the years and are now shrinking. For many reasons, including not needing all the space we have, many churches rent out their facilities on casual and permanent booking arrangements. The Venue Booking feature is a great tool to assist you in the process of managing your booking calendar, and having a centralized booking location for all of your rooms and buildings. For the larger church, that has a lot of meetings on a Sunday, this can even be used for regular booking of meeting spots for Children s Ministries and other groups that might meet on a Sunday. Keeping it all in one place will assist you to know when there is room for someone else to fit in or not! Setting up the Venue Booking Feature Find this in Setup Venue Booking As for all major features, you need to first tell Pastoral Care what facilities you have. Hopefully you already have some names for your rooms, if you don t, now would be a good time to start. Name your rooms in some sort of logical way, and get some name plates printed and put on the outside of each room. This will make bookings easier for people coming to your venue. Perhaps try to avoid some names like Prayer Room etc as these might be off putting to members of the public who may be hiring a room or building. We have Main Hall, MP1, MP2, MP3, Kitchen, Staging Room, Foyer (MP = Multi Purpose) Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 131

133 The Setup Screen You can see here, we have space for MULTIPLE VENUES (typically multiple buildings) and MULTIPLE ROOMS in a venue. There are also settings for standard events. These events are just a pick list with no significant features other than you can easily select them when adding an event to a room. This form has all the standard setup features similar to all of the setup areas including sorting the lists manually or automatically, deleting items etc. Deleting Rooms ONLY delete a room if you are not going to be interested in renting it out! Once deleted, any data in the Venue feature for that room will be deleted. Administrators Booking admins can be manually typed and added, or you can press the icon next to the administrator to add a church person from the database. A booking admin is not the person using the room, it is the person entering the booking and managing that booking if needed. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 132

134 Make a Booking Open the venue booking program from the Church Tab on the main menu Press LOAD to see the calendar for the selected date range Press New Booking on the toolbar Fill in the details Press Check Conflict and Shared Venue to see what else is on around that time Press BOOK to complete the booking At this stage, lets press HELP to see what else is on this screen Book Press the Book Button to save and commit the booking. New Press the New button to create a new booking from scratch Exclusion Dates Exclusion dates are only available, and only relevant for Pattern 1 or Pattern 2 bookings. Where a pattern exists (say Every Sunday) you can enhance that formula with a number of Exclusion Dates to say when that permanent booking is NOT running. (For example on School Holidays etc) Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 133

135 Exclusion Dates are very handy when there is a permanent booking for Junior Church, except on School Holidays. Enter the Exclusion dates for the school holidays, and the rooms used by Junior Church become available for that period Check Conflict Press the Check Conflict button to display any booking conflicts in the following window. From here you can see exactly what is requested (top right corner) and the existing bookings that this new one will conflict with. Pressing or SMS will let you create a message for dealing with this conflict with the Contact Person on this screen. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 134

136 Shared Venue This powerful feature lets you see what room bookings are shared within the venue at or around the same time. This allows you to see at a glance what else is on in the venue at the same time you want to create a booking for another area of the venue. Use the SMS and buttons to communicate with the Contact Person shown on this form. SMS and In ALL booking screens, where you see an SMS or button, you can use that feature to communicate with the person who is managing the booking. This would be the Booking Contact Person, in the screen shown above, this would be Brian Smith Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 135

137 Venue Reports Venue reports lets you print out a number of different reports to assist in the management of your venues. As they are standard reports, you could export them to another format for manipulation. There are 2 main categories for reports, Calendar Based, and All Bookings based. Calendar based allows you to enter some filters and date ranges, whereas All Bookings do not have date filtering. Lets look at a few of the reports to see what is available Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 136

138 WORKING WITH CHILDREN W.C. Fields once said, "Never work with children or animals." But we love to work with children. It is a sad reality of our society that we now need to be compliant with Government Regulations on Working With Children, to keep our children safe. The Pastoral Care Care Plus module is designed to assist you in your compliance with Government Legislation. It is flexible enough to work in any state or territory in Australia, and should work for you. Does using Pastoral Care make your children safe? Does the Government Legislation make your children Safe? NO, it helps just a little bit. Being Comfortable about Child Protection In Pastoral Care, you can rank a person as a Risk, say for example, low medium, high, none etc. Are you becoming uncomfortable yet? You should be! This is the most challenging area in Pastoral Care management without doubt. If you believe that there is anything about a person that makes you want to give them a risk rating other than NONE, should they be in a position of trust with children? This area contains sensitive information about people, or it should! Authors Note: Not only protect your children, protect your volunteers and paid staff as well. It has its own security settings, please use them wisely, and use STRONG PASSWORDS. The staff managing your Working with Children compliance must in our opinion have the following character traits: Integrity Honesty Trustworthy Not prone to Gossip! Have strong secretarial skills ie: able to manage documents, correspondence etc Have access to a LOCKED FILING CABINET Have NO FAMILY TIES to people in children s ministry. (If at all possible) Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 137

139 Use Procedures and Contact Policies to be safer than the WWC program Do you know how many pedophiles are members of your church? Even if you did, and I bet you don t, would they be known to the police? Many predatory people around churches and other organizations do not have a criminal record, and could get a WWC check just as fast as a Minister could! The system cannot actually protect a child from a first offence situation, only a second offence situation, and even then only if they were reported to authorities on the first offence. The absolute best protection from predatory people is to be very practical about safety and contact with children, and have Strong and Clear procedures for ALL contact scenarios with children, and follow those procedures to the letter. Here are some suggestions: Never allow a child to be alone with an adult anywhere for any reason. Install Glass Panels in all doors where children meet Have an Open Door policy on all meeting rooms with Children 2 Adults to escort children to toilets, or better still, parents only allowed to take children to the toilet (Not always practical) 2 Leaders of opposite sex for every children s meeting, possibly one adult and one teenager would do fine If a child needs to be driven somewhere, the more the merrier, take 2 adults of the opposite sex, and NOT a husband and wife team, make it 2 people who are not blood related. You get the idea? It s all about creating an environment where it is as far as practical, impossible for a person to harm a child without a credible witness. (Hence, not blood relatives) If people are around to see, hear etc, then an offence is unlikely to occur in the first place. I have been involved in scouting for over 10 years, and I can tell you that Scouts have excellent contact policies for all contact with kids. In my time as a leader we did have one parent accuse our female scout master of molesting her daughter. This did not get to the police although the parent was encouraged to report it. The reason it did not get that far was that the contact policies were pointed out to the parent, the other leaders verified that protocols were followed for contact on that particular occasion (as they always are) and therefore the offence as claimed could not have physically taken place. Of course, there will always be cases where a person may not follow protocols, and this is a serious problem if it ever occurs, however, procedures and policies for child contact stand a far greater chance of protecting our children than just compliance with WWC alone can do. (You can tell I m a bit passionate about this subject) KEEP YOUR STAFF SAFE Remember to always be mindful of needy people, people demanding attention, and people becoming or setting themselves up to become emotionally dependent on an adult. This can be very dangerous and leave your staff open to false claims of abuse, or even put them in a place where they can be charged for offences that have never happened! Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 138

140 Setting Up Care Plus Find this in Setup Care Plus Under the Settings area, there is a CarePlus setup area. This is where you need to configure the Care Plus module for your own particular needs. It is of worthy consideration to use all features of CarePlus even if they are not legislated for, this will show that you have gone above the requirements when it comes to looking after your children. Starting Up a compliance model Step 1 Type in a name in the Compliance Type field (or abbreviation) of the title of the legislation you are to set up, and press ENTER Step 2 Select it from the list it was added to Step 3 While it is selected, add in Risk Ratings, Status, Reviews, Procedures, Events, Comments and Incident setup Step 4 Setup the Security Tab Press the HELP button to learn a lot more about how to setup this area, with plenty of examples and ideas. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 139

141 User Defined Fields There are 7 User Defined fields in CarePlus, some have dates against them and some have free form text that you can type against them. They are described below: RISK Usually put in something like Low, Medium, High, and Unknown. Now think about ranking your leaders with either a Low Risk Rating, Medium Risk Rating, High Risk Rating??? Unknown is good, this only means they have not been assessed as any risk, you just don t know! Your government guidelines will most likely have something to say about what risk ratings to use for people. STATUS A status is designed to record the status of a currently held (or not held!) certificate. Some examples could be Current, Exempt, Expired etc. Set these up to match the requirements of your own government s needs. REVIEWS A review is an item you can set up to track a review process. This may indicate an internal review process (Most likely use) or an external review process or both PROCEDURE A procedure creates a tick list of items to complete in the process of applying for a WWC card. Some examples could be: Application Sent Police Check Passed Certificate Received Again, these can be setup to match the legislation in your area Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 140

142 EVENT An EVENT allows you to define an event that has a date field to be filled in. Alarms or warnings can be set in Pastoral Care to let you know when these events are due for attention as they expire. For example, one event may be the expiry date of a WWC card, or the expiry of an internal review process, expiry of police check etc. COMMENT A Comment allows you to define a field that can accept text as its input, rather than a date. This allows you to set up more data points to compliment or comply with your local legislation. Another example of a comment could be Position. Fill in Sunday School Teacher, Youth Leader, Youth Director etc INCIDENT This is a status that can be applied to an incident description against a person. Notes Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 141

143 Security The Security area allows you to set up all manner of security options for multiple logins. These are UNIQUE to the CarePlus area, and as such need to be managed carefully. Do NOT forget your passwords here, as there is no secret way in. If you forget a password, you are in deep trouble. If you lock yourself out of here, you will need to send us your data file to have the passwords changed or removed. Use the settings in Settings Security to limit ALL access to CarePlus, and ALL access to CarePlus Settings. This will stop Care Plus users having the power to change their own security levels. THEN set only those people who need access to CarePlus to have access to it by using the Settings Security area in Pastoral Care.! HINT There are TWO security areas to setup for CarePlus. One in the Settings Security for general access to the CarePlus feature, and one in CarePlus settings for actual security and permissions within CarePlus itself. CarePlus Reports The reports area of CarePlus is designed in a Wizard Style that steps you through options to select various options and filters. To run a report, select the report type, select and General Filters, and then press Process. Further options are then displayed for finalizing the report style and information to be shown on the report. Introduction 1 Pastoral Care Fundamentals Page 142