Experience.FellowshipOne.com

Our church is looking into how we could use barcode tags to track families that take an angel tree tag at Christmas.  We would like the ability to assign the tag to a family so that we know that family has taken a tag.  We would also like the ability to scan the tag on the gift when it comes back to us, so that we know that the family has returned the tag with a gift.  We would also like to be able to assign the tag to the family in need so that we know who the gifts go to.  I would like to hear any ideas from all churches as to how your church handles Christmas Angel Tree tags.  F1 doesn't seem to allow us the flexibility we need to do something like this, but I could be wrong.  I am by no means an expert on F1, so if you have any ideas on how this could be handled in F1 or if you know of a system that could handle this, please let me know.   Thank you!

cshelton

The Cove Church

Hi Cove Church,

I was hoping some of your peers would answer this question first. I do have an idea for this that is pretty easy to set up and maintain. You could create an Individual Attribute Group called "Angel Tree". Underneath the group, you can create as many attributes as you want - such as "Pick Up", "Drop Off", "Recipient", etc.

Click here to check out my video to see how this might look. The cool thing about attributes is that they are really flexible report-wise. I could find all people who picked up an angel tree tag, or all people who dropped one off. Or, I could run the report and use Temporary Group as the output type - that will allow me to create a group where I can email everyone who (for example) picked up an angel to remind them of the due date.

Another cool thing I could do is use Query Builder to find all Angel tree attributes who have picked up but who have not dropped off yet. Then I can email these people and remind them of the due date.

Hope this helps!

Tara Coulson
Advocate, Customer Experience
Fellowship Tech

That is awesome!  Thanks!  I am going to show it to my outreach ministry leader and see what she thinks.  I think it will solve lots of problems for them!  Thanks again!  :)

 Crystal Shelton - The Cove Church

Tara,

I love you suggestion and I think it is great.  We only see one problem with it.  Sometimes we have a whole school that we support that we are not given the names of the children to whom the gifts would go to and they are not even attenders of our church.  We are just given information like Female, age 8, size 7 pants, size 8 shirt, etc.  How could we track these gifts if the receiver is not in our Fellowship One database?

 Thanks for all your input.

Blessings,

Crystal

Hi Crystal,

It was nice talking to you! I love the idea of creating custom barcode tags for your angel tree ornaments. That's great... As I mentioned, if you do not have people in your database that are the angel tree recipients (like the case of adopting the school kids), you can keep these in an Excel spreadsheet. You can scan the barcode in just like you do in the Individual Attributes field in my video.

Please feel free to call if you have questions or run into snags. 469-442-0041

Blessings!

Tara

Tara,

I want to personally thank you for your committment to serve us in this way.  You have been MOST helpful!  By the way, my IT cohort, Bob Austin, says to tell you hello. 

I am looking forward to meeting you at DC '09. 

THANK YOU!  THANK YOU!  THANK YOU!!

All for Him,

Crystal Shelton

The Cove Church

My pleasure Crystal! And "hi" back to Bob. I'll be praying for your safe journey and will look for you all and the conference.

Blessings!

Tara

We love this idea of using fellowship one attributes to track these.  Do you have any ideas of how to effectively but quickly enter this information after a Sunday morning service of 3500 people where there are no lines to wait in?  We do not like the idea of having portal open in the middle of our large atrium for people to look over our shoulders and see someone's personal information.  We want to streamline this process so that it would not be a burden to someone taking a tag.  However, if we do not already have their information in fellowship one, it is going to be quite a task of entering their info in the atrium.  We are a church with many more attendees than members and attendees aren't always the best at letting us have their contact information or keeping it updated.  Let me know if you have any ideas or how your church effectively carries this out. 

Thanks!

What if, instead of entering the information while people are selecting their angels, you made it so that you could enter the information later? Check out the Angel Tree card I mocked up (I downloaded the one from angeltree.org and modified it slightly) http://experience.fellowshipone.com/Downloads/AngelTreeTagBarcode.pdf.

I used the free Barcode 39 font to create the barcode. The idea is that people could tear off the bottom portion, fill in name, phone, and email and just drop it off at the information kiosk. They could then take the angel and attach to their gift when they return it to the church.

You will still have to keep a spreadsheet of the original angels to keep track of each angel and the description, but you could use Fellowship One and attributes to keep track of the people bringing angels gifts.

Blessings!

Tara