Experience.FellowshipOne.com

How are people using F1 as part of a shepherding program where the elders of the congregation are each checking in with their own group of families/individuals?  We would like to be able to keep notes of contacts, prayer requests, etc, as well as be notified of new notes.  Is this type of thing handled through Groups, or via the relationship management piece?

 Thanks for your insights.

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your question.  There are several ways to handle what you are requesting.  In order to give you the best answer, it would probably be beneficial for us to get a little more background on what your current situation is.  For instance:

- How many elders are we talking about?
- How many people is each elder working with?
- Do your elders have F1 Portal access? (I am assuming not)
- How often are they communicating with their families / individuals?
- Does anyone else communicate with these families / individuals besides the elder assigned to them?

Knowing these things can help us to point you in a direction most efficient for your environment.

Each of the solutions you mentioned in your original post have their own place in Fellowship One.  If each of your elders are only looking after 2 or 3 families or individuals, relationship manager may be the way to go for you.  In order to be "notified" of any new notes or prayer requests, you would need to pull relationship reports.

Contacts is also an option, but using contacts will most likely require the elder to have his people put into a small group format, or the elder will need access to the Fellowship One management portal so they can work the contacts.  I'm not sure if this would be a good option for you at this point or not.

Finally, groups will do many things for you, but those things are in the future.  Depending on the urgency of your request, groups may or may not be a viable solution.  We are still months away from releasing the next update to groups, but when we update functionality, you will eventually have pretty granular control over what your elders can do with regards to your shepherding program.  I'd venture to say that eventually, groups will be the answer you are looking for.  Unfortunately, we're still a ways off from being able to exploit the functionality that will be available.

If you wouldn't mind replying with a little more detail about your situation, I'm sure we can come up with a solution that will help you out, at least in the short term, if not the long.

 Blessings -

Jeff Lewis

Jeff,

Thanks for the response.  I'll attempt to fill in many details here. 

Our situation is as follows, and may require a combination of solutions: 

• We have 6 unpaid elders that would be participating in this, including 2 that currently have portal access.
• Each one will have between 60-80 people in 40-50 households
• The idea is to contact each family about every 2 months to check in and ask them how we can be praying for them
• There may be "cross-group" contacts where (for a variety of reasons) an elder, small group leader, or minister would want to pass on information about a contact for further follow-up

It would be wonderful to be able to get a prayer request from one of the congregation and be able to easily share that with other elders.  Also, being able to generate reports with contact information, attendance records, etc. would be very handy - even if those needed to be run centrally and emailed out.

May the Peace of Christ be with you!

   -Mark

Mark -

Couple of quick thoughts on this:

- I'm not sure that small group manager will actually help here.  The issue is that you won't have notes tied to the indiviuals, but, to the group instead. 

- Relationship Manager would work better, but would require you to explicitly create each relationship (if I have 60 people, I need 60 relationships).  This way I could see the notes for each individual, as opposed to the group as a whole

- If multiple people need access to the notes, but not to the management portal, more than 2 people can be tied to a relationship.

- Prayer requests - you can create a prayer request form on your website which is turned into a contact to be worked internally.  This is a feature of Weblink.

 I hope these bullets help you somewhat.  Sometimes it can be hard to help engineer solutions over a forum such as this.  If you need further help, you may want to consider a few hours of personalized consulting.  Please visit https://experience.fellowshipone.com/Experience/education.aspx and explore the options for consulting from a consultant here at Fellowship Technologies.

 Blessings to you, Mark,

Jeff