Administration

Champion Team meetings

tolmstead — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:42:13 GMT

How are churches conducting their Champion Team meetings?

Do any of you have agendas for meetings you have held?

Outlook Ready File

dschleyer — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:13:35 GMT

We are looking for a report that pulls out individual contact information (e.g. name, address, emails, phone numbers, etc.) that we can then import (or in the case of Entoruage, script) into Outlook. Does anyone know of a report and/or process within F1?

Thanks!

David Schleyer

Director of Operations

Kid's Check-in promotion

kfulton — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:44:22 GMT

Is there a way to automatically set up Fellowship One to bump kids up to the next grade due to their age?

Browse and Edit All People Records

jbarineau — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:42:14 GMT

Is there some way to do this? We have just started using F1 and our old database had some stray characters (like * or &) that were there and we want to browse all the records now to clean up any that might have been brought over from the old system. What is the best way of doing this? I can't seem to find a way to just "browse" each record without using a Report, and I can't find a report that will let me flip through each record and make any edits necessary!

Thanks!

Entering attendance

aweaver — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:13:45 GMT

I am new to F1 and working with the attendance process as my first assignment at our church. We do not use the automated check in process (hopefully we will in January) so everything is still done manually. We print rosters and use them for sign in and then to post attendance. An issue that we are having is that a new person may not fill out a new contact card but still sign in on the roster. We can not enter them into the database because we have no information for them. When it comes time to post attendance, we know they were here but can't add them because they are not in the database. It is causing our attendance reports and head count reports to differ. Is there a best practice we can use for these people so at least their presence is accounted for when posting attendance? Thanks for any suggestions.

Giftedness Programs

sbatson — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:30:42 GMT

I'm in the process of trying to use the Giftedness Programs in Fellowship but I'm having major issues with it. The program my church is using is set up differently than the way FOne has theirs constructed, so I'm trying to find a way to get ours to work within the system. We just need a way to track our members/attendees giftedness so we can plug them into volunteer roles.

If you have worked with the Giftedness Programs before and have any ideas, please let me know.

Thanks,

Shannon

Status/sub-status for children of divorced families

cshelton — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:44:07 GMT

Our church is large enough that we have lots of families that attend where the husband and wife divorced and both remarried and both new families attend. When the parents check in their children for our children's ministry program or register them for something through weblinks, both families want the children on their household. So, we have children in the database that stay in the database, duplicated. We are looking for a correct way to assign a sub-status to these children so that our duplicate person can easily see on a substatus that they are in the described situation so they don't get merged anymore. I would like to hear how other churches handle these type situations or maybe what the status is that you use to define them. Thank you for any info you can provide!

Blessings!

Printing a Church Directory

lwood — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:19:22 GMT

We are new to Fellowship One and are still learning lots. My senior pastor really wants us to be able to print a church directory with pictures of everyone we have in our database. I have looked through the reports and cannot seem to find one that covers what we need. Basically we just need to have the household head and spouse, any children in the household, the phone numbers and address and a picture if it is in their file. Has anyone used a report in the database to do this or do I need to have a special report created? Any suggestions would be great!

Thanks,

Lauren Wood

Church of the Living God, Manchester, CT

Trouble Adding New Users

jackibar — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 02:27:40 GMT

Our church is in the process of having our old database converted over into F1. In the meantime, I am trying to add the staff as new portal users. If I'm understanding correctly, I am not to add the individual records at this time because that info will be wiped out when the database is imported into F1. So I am unable to "link" portal users at this time.

So I am in Admin - Security Setup - Portal Users and click on Add New. I fill out all the info required and click on the Add New Portal User button. When I then return to the Portal Users Summary, the person I tried to add does not show up. Can you tell me what I'm missing?!

Thanks so much,

Jacki

Best Practice for saving emails

ddoell — Wed, 20 May 2009 23:56:10 GMT

FT - Please let us know the official best practice for saving emails. If everyone is to have their own individual email address then who's email should be saved to the household?

Thanks!

Debbie Doell, Cornerstone Fellowship, Livermore

Keeping participant assignments up to date

jcronin — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:35:58 GMT

We are in our second year of using F1. My question is regarding a best practice situation with participant assignments and what is the best way to keep them updated.

The more activities that one is involved with, the more participant assignments they accumulate. After awhile, this becomes a lot of outdated information attached to their profile. If the activity is one that runs year around and the person is moved up by grade, then 'move assignments' helps keep this clean by eliminating the assignment that they are moving out of.

If it is an activity that reoccurs each year but takes a break (and thus has a start and stop date), then you end up having to create a new schedule for each year. Now you are faced with the best way to assign them to the new schedule and they accumulate a new participant assignment each year.

How are others handling this? Run a report and manually delete assignments at the end of each year for any ministry activities? Accept this as a quick history at a glance for people's involvement?

Small Group Finder emails to Administrators

aborresen — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:51:30 GMT

I have raised an enhancement request asking for our portal administrators to be able to choose who receives the enquiry emails from Small Group Finder. At preset the email is sent to the Administrator and Group Manager of the Small Group. Our Small Group Department who use F1 Portal would like to be the ones receiving all enquiry emails and not the small group administrators or managers.

Does anyone have any ideas on how we can work around this until the enhancement is available?

Statuses and Youth Ministry

lwood — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:09:06 GMT

We are trying to better organize our statuses and sub-statuses and are coming up with some issues having to do with our youth ministry. Right now, the youth ministry has it's own status with sub-statuses under that (infrequent attender, infrequent sunday am attender, visitor, etc.) These are for when someone from the youth ministry primarily just attends the youth ministry and either attends a different church on Sunday mornings or does not attend a church on Sunday mornings at all. Then we have a status under our regular attenders that is regular attender main church and youth ministry. Then we have an inactive status with the youth ministry as a sub-status for youth that only attended the youth ministry and are now inactive. Then we have another status of member/youth ministry so that we know that they attend the youth ministry and are also a member of the church.

This works great for reporting purposes, but we are finding that we need to keep creating more statuses and sub-statuses and it is getting confusing for our data entry people what they should select for each person.

If we tracked attendance for the youth ministry it would probably take care of this, but we do not have check-in at this time. We have not come up with a good way to get an accurate attendance any other way.

One option that we came up with as a possible solution to this was to create an attribute that is for the youth ministry and track all attenders of any type in the youth ministry that way. Then we would keep the status options to just those that attend on a Sunday morning. If a youth does not attend on a Sunday morning then their status would be inactive but they would have an attribute to the youth ministry. I am a little concerned how this would work for reporting purposes.

So I have a few questions:

1. What are other ministries doing to track their youth ministry?

2. What types of statuses do you use?

3. What do you think of the attribute option?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Lauren Wood

Church of the Living God

Manchester, CT

Mark entries as staff members

dannyeason — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:10:55 GMT

If I have entered households how do I mark certain individuals as staff members or add staff?

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

Sherryd — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:54:25 GMT

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

Background check file too easily accessed

treeser — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:19:22 GMT

I am very concerned about the fact that anyone who has edit rights has the ability to open the background check file and view a person's criminal history and social security history. I feel this is very unsafe and our church members would not appreciate their history being viewed. We run background checks as a requirement on a lot of our volunteers.We are a large church and a lot of people have edit rights. Can F1 find a way to make edit rights more specific or perhaps F1 shouldn't be attaching the background check file? Any thoughts?

Tina Reeser

Any idea when Mass Action will be avaliable?

jthacker — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:40:02 GMT

I really need this option so that I do not have to spend hours adding end dates to over 200 college students records. We made the jump to F1 in Jan and I did not enter a end date for the college student's attributes. I need to add a new one for this year to mark that they are part of the college ministry and need to end the one from last year. Please tell me this coming soon. It said late summer, but summer is almost up!

Thanks,

Suggested Bandwidth

ddrewery — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:54:51 GMT

What is the ideal bandwidth needed for F1? We're currently on a T1 and its not cutting it. Our main problem is that it is being used for other purposes during check-in times and we're working on that but I'm in the middle of getting bids for a much faster connection and would like to know what is optimal just for F1. We generally have about 9 kiosk check-ins working at once but don't really have a way right now to monitor how much each one is using. With the T1, obviously we're locked in at 1.5 up and 1.5 down.. I'm looking at a 15 down and 2.5 up option.. I'm pretty sure this will help since F1 should be the only thing really sending out.

F1 Multi-Site administration

TheNieb — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:12:23 GMT

We are getting ready to launch our second site and I need to create the administration plan for F1 usage at both sites. Our two sites will be about an hour apart, so I don't know how much crossover we will have between the two congregations.

What works WELL for multi-site implementation? (different status's, different attributes, something else?)

What doesn't work?

Why did you choose one option over another?

How does the option you picked affect check-in?

If you had to do it ALL over again would you talk to F1 about creating a new DB for the second site?

Support users

michaelf — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:05:08 GMT

When we are working with F1 support we are often asked to provide a usename and password so they can troubleshoot the issue. We have a user leftover from our install that has full rights to the database. We usually provide this login to the support technician so they can run tests on our database. Recently I've become uncomfortable with providing this since case notes are emailed and email is not secure. I would propose that F1 have a back door into all of our application instances so we do not have to frequently email passwords back and forth and so the investigation does not have to wait on the person who opened the tech support case.

Google Gadgets and Searching F1-Is this possible?

katiesmith — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:43:03 GMT

Our Director of IT had heard that it might be possible in the very near future to have a Google Gadget for searching our F1 database. Do any of you know if this is actually in the works?

Thanks for your help!

Katie Smith

Cedar Springs Presbyterian Church

Check-in with requirement alert

jalfors — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:22:43 GMT

We are looking for a way to have an alert pop up if a student does not have a requirement. Starting in the fall we are going to have an annual release form that we will be handing out and asking parents to fill out and return. It would include a medical release form in case we would need it during our regular programming or for any day trips we do throughout the year. Is there anyway to flag a student who doesn't have this so that we get a warming when they check-in? Any ideas?

The only thing that I've thought of would be to make a seperate RLC for those who do not have the release on file. We currently have a RLC for each small group and we have about 30 just in our Jr. High program. So we would either need to make 2 RLC's for each small group, or we wouldn't know which group that student was in if we put all the students without a release in the same RLC.

Fellowship One Maintenance "To Do" List

Eric Brown — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:24:39 GMT

I was wondering if any users have created a maintenance "to do" list for Fellowship. I am looking for something that includes all weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly reports and procedures.

I need to create or obtain one for our church, but I would rather not reinvent the wheel.

Thanks

Eric

Children Becoming Adults

sherrman — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 21:48:00 GMT

What does your church have as it's policy regarding adult children? We change their marital status from child/youth to single when they graduate from high school, but what do you do about the member status in the household?

Do you leave their member status as a child, or seperate them into their own household at the same address? When they graduate from high school, college, become 18, 19, 25. etc.?

Do you leave their position in the household listed as 'child', marital status 'single' or do you move them into their own household as head of household, same address as parents? When do you do this (when they graduate from high school, when they get out of college, etc.)?

Do you note anywhere on their record who their parents are if you move them into their own household?

If you leave them as a child in their parent's household, do you have a process for making them their own household in the future?

How does having an adult child in the household (as single) affect reporting & mailings sent out?

When do you apply your procedure? What do you consider the 'best practice'?

Thanks! Sherry

pay scale help please for a fellowship champion

brenda.arrendale — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:08:35 GMT

We are new to fellowship. Any help will be appreciated.

What is the average pay scale for a fellowship champion with church size of about 1,500 - 1,800 actual attendees on a Sunday morning?