Youth

Self Check In for Students

jtreat — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:02:04 GMT

We recently started using Self Check In. We have a separate student building so kids are coming over w/out their parent (and the parent has the key tag.) Our student ministry has exploded almost overnight so we are experiencing looongg lines for assisted check in. We want to get the students using self check in. However, it doesn't seem to be realistic that students who don't drive will keep a key tag with them. I have heard a couple of people on staff talk about churches that keep key tags for the students on a Rolodex file and so it's assisted check in because the card is pulled for them swiped and the tag printed but self check because the need to look up the student is eleviated so you still get the speed of self check in.

Does anyone do that? How exactly do you do it? Does it work? Does anyone else have any other suggestions?

Thanks!!

Julie Treat

The MET

281.890.1900

Up to date student information

wstorey — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:56:13 GMT

We have a relatively large church and are starting to see a problem with our student information in F1. We want this information to be correct, obviously, because without correct, up to date information the reports are pretty much useless. We've found that high school students tend to change email addresses often and it's difficult to keep up with schools, etc.

Can any of you F1 users tell me how your church is handling this? At this point our best idea is having a particular day in the year when students fill out a card and update their information, but there has to be a better way!

Bulk Mail Options

Linda Belgiano — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:39:29 GMT

One way our youth directors communicate with the high school students has been direct snail mail. Since F1 does not offer that function, is there anyone who has found a suitable alternative to Bulk mail? First class mail is so much more expensive than bulk mail, which we were able to do in Shelby, our former database. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Linda Belgiano

Mars Hill Bible Church

Status and Youth Ministry

lwood — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:56:19 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

Keeping custom information on students?

bmyers — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 14:56:46 GMT

Our student ministry has so much to offer to kids relationally, but struggles with keeping up with useful data because we don't have a good way to manage it in F1. Of course we can keep up with all the normal items, such as name, email, phone, address, IM name, etc. What about things like sports played, favorite food/drink, etc.? Is there a way to begin to capture these things and be able to use them? I would almost like them to be an additional attribute but doing so would really be too broad (I think). Has anyone solved this challenge?

Creative ways to get youth groups to check in

jcronin — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:29:29 GMT

We are looking for ways to boost our check in numbers for our two youth groups. We have both a Jr. High and a Sr. High group which meet on different nights. There seems to be a gap between the actual head count number and what the system check in reflects. The gap is biggest in the high school age group.

Currently we are not using bar codes or self check in, but do use assisted check in. We have even moved the check in area to be directly ahead of the entrance doors. We've tried to build in incentives for those who have checked in as well.

We are open to any creative ways that other churches have found to be successful.