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Looking for the best way to configure caregiving in Fellowship One.

Our church provides caregiving for most of our on-site events throughout the week.  Each day is unique in that the number of events and children can vary.  One day we may use two classrooms to acommodate all the children needing childcare and the next we might use six classrooms.  This can also fluctuate between a morning event and an evening event.  Most of our children are not pre-registered and we rely on the kiosk to make a best fit assignment.

My questions are:

1.  How do you configure your activites, schedules, groups and RLC's?  Keep in mind our configuration can change from week to week.  Not all Mondays have the same caregiving needs, neither do Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, etc.

2.  How do you know what event the parent is attending, assuming there are multiple ministry events happening at the same time?

3.  How do you manage caregiving staff and their children?  We have regular paid staff and some volunteers.  We use a new set of volunteers each week for our MOPS meetings.

3.   Do your caregiving attendants have a participant assignment?

4.  The costs associated with caregiving are passed back to the ministry requesting the care.  If we have 100 kids at one time how could we track the number of kids in attendance by ministry?

5.  Our parents still check the child in on a roster after using the kiosk since we are unable to print reports quick enough to provide accurate head counts.  This also provides a method of knowing what event the parent is attending. 

Thank you in advance for any feedback you may have.
 

Wow.  This is a good question.  Or should I say these are good questions.  Let me try and answer some of them for you. 

1. I can think of 2 ways to handle this situation.  The first is for each ministry that requires caregiving to create their own structure for caregiving under each of their activities.  Fellowship Technologies could then create a report that pulls that information out by ministry and allows the church to bill the proper ministry for each child that uses the service.  This would  also help the care givers to know where the parents might be if there is a problem.  I.E.  the activity might be  "Beth Moore Bible Study" but the RLC might be 3yr old.  It will print the activity name on the tag as well as the RLC.  A standard structure should be agreed upon.  Use the physical rooms themselves to identify which ages go into which room.  Since this does change every week and probibly can even change on the day of the event (you get 50 2 year olds and need a third room) you need the flexibility to not tie an age group to a physical room in the system.  One big issue I see with this approach is the redundancy of setup per event.  Another issue is there is no longer a central location to see how many kids you have each day.  The second way to resolve this might be to setup a standard structure for caregiving in one place under one ministry that gives you flexiblilty at the room level to move kids where you need them by physically moving them from one location to the next. 
   
2. Depending on what approach you take to answer #1 this might not be an issue any more.  If you take option #2 you will need to resolve this with a custom report.  I would ask the reporting team to give you a total # of children attending the Caregiving event where they are tied together by the event their parents were attending at the same time.  This won't be perfect but it will get you close.  Staff kids, volunteer kids, parents not checking in, and kids seporated from their parents in the database could all affect this report. 
   
3. I am not sure I understand this question but I will take a stab.  Even if you have a new group of volunteers every week you have to run a background check on them all if they are woking with kids.  And everyone checks into the system just like the kids do.  Also you had 2 #3 questions.  Your caregiving volunteers must have a staffing assignment.  Participants don't have to have a staffing assignment. 
   
4. I answered this with #2 above.  Now I am not sure what #2 was really asking.  If you are asking how do we find the parents then that can be answered by a report.  We have reports where you can see where every family member is checked into the church by a given day.  I think it is called the security tag report. 
   
5. This is correct.  You need to continue doing this but I would ask that you have the volunteer at the door fill it out as the parent walks up.  Just because they checked into the kiosk doesn't mean they will actually make it to the room.  You need an accurate roster at the room in case of emergency. 
   

I hope this helps. 

Matt McMaster

Delivery Manager