Experience.FellowshipOne.com

Hello,

I am wondering how other churches communicate via e-mail with parents of the children that attend Sunday morning Children's Ministry. We can use reports or run a query of all children with a participant assignment, but we want to send a group e-mail. Most of these children don't have e-mail addresses, and we want to contact the parents. How does your church handle this?

Thank you,
Sarah
Receptionist / F1 Champion at Summit View Church in Vancouver, WA

 

Sarah,

  One option may be to send directly to those children.  If none of them have e-mail addresses we will move up to the e-mail address of the Household.  Of course, you could still hit a child's e-mail address that way, but it's a possibility.  I know you can always submit a request to the help desk and realize that can take a while if things are busy.

If you haven't done so already, I'd suggest adding a vote to this idea:

http://experience.fellowshipone.com/ideas/idea/archive/2007/12/19/sending-email-to-parents-of-a-participant-child-or-youth.aspx

In Him,

-Peter Schott

Peter,

Thanks for your response. We actually don't use the household e-mail in our church, instead we use head of household and spouse. My understanding is that if there is no child e-mail address and no household e-mail address (even if there is head and spouse), that the e-mail will not get sent to the family. I found a report that contains the info I need. However, I don't see a way to use Fellowship One to send the e-mail through a group. We can copy the addresses into Outlook and send them the old fashioned way if we have a time sensitive situation. I appreciate you taking the time to respond.

Sarah

 

We are looking for the same answer- we need to e-mail the parents of children who have participant assignments in various minitries. We have  asked support to write a report for us but if all your children have an attribute you can use report M1465E. it only works if all the children have an attribute- but it's a start.

Susan

Communioty Bible Church, San Antonio

We have the same challenge; we have created an attribute for parents, so that we can easily identify them, however this is a data entry nightmare with a church of 12K+.  Also, I have coordinators who would like to just email a segment of our parents, for instance maybe just preschool or just 5th grade.  Does anyone have a solution for this?

We set up an activity called Children Parent Email or Preschool Parent Email then assigned our parents to one or both of them depending what age children they have.  Then we just run a query and send out a group email.

When we input a new household or child we go ahead and make the parent email assignment at that time.  It has worked great for us.

 

Janna Johnson

---

Janna Johnson
Community Life Church
Family Ministry Assistant
972-564-5433

I'm pretty new at this, but couldn't you have the children get their parent's email the previous week, and then give you their emails at check-in? This suggestion is a chime-in on the second point from jjohnson. Hope this helps, or at least give us a lead on the solution.

Be Blessed.

Jonnathon

Hi Sarah,

We use report # P2000E, it looks for households with children and emails one or both parents (if they both submitted individual emails) about the Children's Ministry.

 

Hope this helps

 

Lillie

F1 Champion at Christian City Church, San Diego

Hi Susan,

 We use report # P2000E to pull all households with children.  It sends an email to one or both parents - whoever provided a personal email.  Just make sure personal email address are posted under each individual and not under households.

 Lillie

F1 Champion for Christian City Church San Diego

We had a report written M1800e- that lets you search by participant assignment and get the parents and kids e-mails. It has worked really well for our Sunday school and for our children's choirs.

A user suggested this feature on the Ideas site, and we at Fellowship Technolgies will be offering a nifty solution sometime this summer.  What the feature allows the user to do is to take a People List and "pivot" the list to show either the parents of the children on the list; or vice versa, the children of the parent in the list.   By either using Query Builder or the new Temporary Groups as a report output, the user can create the initial list of people; for example children that have an assignment or attended an activity.  Then from that list they can pivot the individuals to show the parents of the children from the original list.  Since People List groups will not allow duplicate individuals in the same list, only one set of unique parents will appear in the list even if multiple children are in the original list.  Cool!  Couple with the recently added "Send to unique email addresses only:" feature of Group Email you won't send mutltiple emails to the same address. Even cooler!

Curtis Harris will be blogging and demoing this new feature in the next few days.  Be sure and monitor his blog "Intelligent Ideas" on the blog tab of the Experience site.