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Volunteer access to the portal...do you give this away easily?

Last post 03-18-2009, 1:58 PM by Kim Ludwick. 11 replies.
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     03-13-2009, 11:54 AM 13946

    • Sherryd is not online. Last active: 11-20-2009, 10:48 AM Sherryd
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    • Shoreline Christian Center - Austin, TX
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    Volunteer access to the portal...do you give this away easily?

    Hello everyone - I would like to know how your church handles portal access control.  We have a large church and we rely upon volunteers quite a bit to help us out (as I am sure each of you do as well).  The problem I am having is that I feel like too many volunteers are getting access to the database to do small tasks for staff members.  Currently, we have about 37% of our portal users who are volunteers.  Do you have a limit on the number of volunteers?  Do you have a type of control that is set or do you give out portal access at all to volunteers?  Your ideas & practices would be very helpful to me.  Thank you!

    Sherry Donaldson
    sherry.donaldson@shoreline.net


    Sherry Donaldson

    Database Manager
    Shoreline Christian Center
    | Filed under: ,

     03-13-2009, 12:05 PM 13947 in reply to 13946

    Re: Volunteer access to the portal...do you give this away easily?

    Hi, our church does not give away portal access easily.  We are a large church also - around 3000 in attendance.  We probably have a total of 17 volunteers who have portal access. 

     We make all of the ministry leaders go through their administrative assistants who are staff members.  If they need something big done, then we call our 17 volunteers and bring them in to get the project done if it fits their schedule.   Hope that helps.

     03-13-2009, 12:14 PM 13948 in reply to 13947

    • Sherryd is not online. Last active: 11-20-2009, 10:48 AM Sherryd
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    Re: Volunteer access to the portal...do you give this away easily?

    Yes.  That does help.  I hope other churches will respond like you have.   I would really like to implement that type volunteer access that you currently are using.  Thank you!
    Sherry Donaldson

    Database Manager
    Shoreline Christian Center
    | Filed under: ,

     03-16-2009, 12:24 AM 13956 in reply to 13946

    Re: Volunteer access to the portal...do you give this away easily?

    While I would not use the word easily, we did get unlimited users specifically because we were going to roll this out with a lot of volunteer access.

    We are a church with an average attendance of about 1100 per weekend.  We have about 60% of our users are volunteers.  We have a lot of volunteer staff.  We have volunteer workers, but we also work hard through our iServe ministry to establish volunteer staff whom have regular roles, many of them even with office space.  Mostly they work from home.  That is the power of the F1 SaaS.  We are having our volunteers telecommute in a way that we could never do before F1.

    They are treated with the same intake process as staff... they complete a background check, fill out an application, complete a confidentially agreement and have a reference check, then have to complete F1 trainings online and have some in person trainings that we do afterhours or on weekends.  Our volunteer pipeline coordinator, for example is a volunteer.  She works abut 20 hours a week, some from home, some in the office.  Combined with our windows terminal server and VPN she has an email and user account on our server and voice mail she can check from home.

    When they begin serving or end serving a contact item is opened for them to have F1 access setup for them or shut down.

    We are very careful with the access controls.  I have a ton of roles setup.  However in some cases our volunteers have more access then associate pastors (because they will muck something up, but a trained volunteer won't).  Of course they don’t' have confidential access, in most cases, and very few people have giving access at all, even staff.

    We have a couple of generic logins with very limited access, such as for our check-in volunteers to check authorized pickup persons, etc.

    So we have found it a big, big, advantage to deploy F1 with a lot of volunteer access.  It does require some good processes and it does required more work on out part to do training off hours, and set access control, and get a lot of .. hey they don’t have access to this and need it request, which we deal with on an individual case by case basis.. but we find it worth it.  Here are few examples of what volunteers do on F1 at our church.

    Process New from Website and New From Check-in each week.

    Adding all new people to the system

    After delivering cookies to first time visitors volunteers open a contact item for each family that starts our first time visitor contact process.

    Manage our prayer chain

    Treasure to run finance reports

    Key volunteer ministry directors do everything from setting up activities, to running reports.

    Hope this helps.

    -Jeff Cox

     


    Jeff Cox
    Business Administrator
    Church on the Hill
    McMinnville, OR
    www.hillchurch.com
    jcox@hillchurch.com

     03-16-2009, 2:18 PM 13963 in reply to 13956

    • Sherryd is not online. Last active: 11-20-2009, 10:48 AM Sherryd
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    Re: Volunteer access to the portal...do you give this away easily?

    Thank you Jeff.  It is good to get an idea of what other churches are doing.  I appreciate your response.
    Sherry Donaldson

    Database Manager
    Shoreline Christian Center

     03-18-2009, 3:17 AM 13972 in reply to 13946

    Re: Volunteer access to the portal...do you give this away easily?

    Sherry

    I am the Database Manager for our church which is also on the larger side. We have two campuses and between the two we have 4 weekend services, this is in addition to our Young Adults service that takes place in the middle of the week. We are an extremely busy church,outside of weekly services we also have a TV program, 5 major conferences each year, camps, Forever Home in South Africa, Small Groups, quarterly magazine and the list goes on so we couldn't do what we do without volunteers. Having said that I am very particular about setting up logins for volunteers.

    In the event that a staff person comes to me requesting a login for a volunteer I ask allot of questions, there has to be a legitimate reason the volunteer needs their own login. In order for someone to volunteer at our church they must go through several steps. They have to complete our Membership Class which we call Make It Your Church. They also have to be baptized and have a background check.

    There are several ways we deal with F1 logins for volunteers, in addition to the requirements I stated above we also require that they sign a privacy form. They also must be trained by me so that I can be assured that they are using F1 the proper way. There are a handful of volunteers that I have granted personal logins for F1. These are people that have a long history with the church and through years of serving we know their heart and worth ethics. I have also setup general logins for most of our departments such as Youth, Young Adults, kids, and some others. These logins are in most cases linked to the Admin Assistant for that area. This allows the Admin Assistants to be able to utilize multiple volunteers within their department and know what the volunteers are able to access while volunteering for them. Depending on the department and the frequency/consistency with a volunteer in some cases the login info is provided to the volunteer, in other cases a staff person must log the volunteer in so they don't actually have access to the login info.

    Ultimately we try to have any volunteer work that requires F1 access to be done at the church during office hours or during down-time between our two Sunday service. This is just one more way to make sure that the F1 system is being used for church related work.

    I really look at the frequency in which a volunteer is going to serve before authorizing them to do work in F1. When in comes to DB work I have to know that the volunteer takes the work serriously and understands the importance of accuracy, and consistancy.

    One thing you have to stay on top of when you grant volunteers access to F1 is who is actively volunteering. In the event that a volunteer moves on to another department or even leaves the church you have to change passwords. Even if the login was issued at the department level and not an individual level you will still want to issue a new password to that department.

    I hope this info helps you out.


    Kim Ludwick
    Database Manager
    Champions Centre
    "One Church, Two Locations"
    Tacoma/Bellevue, WA

     03-18-2009, 8:37 AM 13978 in reply to 13972

    Re: Volunteer access to the portal...do you give this away easily?

    We are a church of about 10,000 weekend attendance with over 150 different events/classes occurring weekly. Typically we have 12 plus events that are open for online registration through Fellowship. Like any other church our size we could not function without substantial volunteers. We have one full-time Fellowship One champion/support and two co-champions who are volunteers. The "trust" model works for us.  If a ministry askes for a volunteer login we generally provide it as both the ministry and we are conscious of what access means. We have about 180 active portal logins with about 100 being used in any week. Weekly we look at login history. If a login has not been used for 60 days we normally make it inactive.  That helps us keep the education and support focused to those who use the system. And it simply clears out the user who has moved on. That has been very successful for us for 3 years. We also have processes for fingerprinting for volunteers and indentifying individuals who can only serve after a discussion with our counseling ministry about their situation.  This and being alert to usage has kept us in a good condition.
    Dan

     03-18-2009, 11:20 AM 13980 in reply to 13978

    • ddoell is not online. Last active: 11-20-2009, 10:59 PM ddoell
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    Re: Volunteer access to the portal...do you give this away easily?

    Are most churches requiring background checks for volunteers that are using the portal?

    -Debbie, Cornerstone Fellowship


    Debbie Doell
    Fellowship One Coordinator
    Cornerstone Fellowship 348 North Canyons Parkway Livermore, CA 94551
    www.cornerstoneweb.org

     03-18-2009, 11:24 AM 13981 in reply to 13972

    • Sherryd is not online. Last active: 11-20-2009, 10:48 AM Sherryd
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    Re: Volunteer access to the portal...do you give this away easily?

    Thank you Kim.  I truly appreciate your response. 
    Sherry Donaldson

    Database Manager
    Shoreline Christian Center

     03-18-2009, 11:25 AM 13982 in reply to 13978

    • Sherryd is not online. Last active: 11-20-2009, 10:48 AM Sherryd
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    Re: Volunteer access to the portal...do you give this away easily?

    Thank you Dan!
    Sherry Donaldson

    Database Manager
    Shoreline Christian Center

     03-18-2009, 11:28 AM 13983 in reply to 13980

    • Sherryd is not online. Last active: 11-20-2009, 10:48 AM Sherryd
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    Re: Volunteer access to the portal...do you give this away easily?

    Hey Debbie - Currently, we only require background checks on any volunteers that work with children.  Although, I think it is a good idea to expand it to volunteers who have access to the portal.
    Sherry Donaldson

    Database Manager
    Shoreline Christian Center

     03-18-2009, 1:58 PM 13985 in reply to 13983

    Re: Volunteer access to the portal...do you give this away easily?

    Debbie

    We run backgroun checks on all volunteers regardless of whether or not they have portal access or if they work with kids. We very rarely run into scenarios where something severe enough comes back to where we feels its best for the person to not volunteer. However, depending on the different things that come up on reports this helps us to not only identify people who shouldn't be around kids but also money. We have a coffee shoppe, we also have money bags at Guest Services when we are registering people for events etc...

    For us its really about the security of not only our volunteers but also our church members and by running background checks on everyone it simply gives us a heads up on any potential issues. We do not go through Fellowship for our background checks. We run our own background checks here through our local Washington State Patrol. We have a website that we login to and because we are Non profit it doesn't cost us anything to run them and we can run the checks as often as we want.


    Kim Ludwick
    Database Manager
    Champions Centre
    "One Church, Two Locations"
    Tacoma/Bellevue, WA
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