Experience.FellowshipOne.com

I just read the notice that all user accounts must be linked with an individual record. What will happen to accounts that are not linked to an individual record? We have several generic user accounts for use by anyone filling certain volunteer positions.

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Rob Guilliams
Director of Computer Services
Highview Baptist Church
Louisville, KY

Rob,

  This notice is an effort to get people ready for an upcoming change to F1.  The need to link a user to an Individual record will mainly affect the functionality of people lists.  If these users do not use people lists, then there will be no adverse effect.  If they use people lists, you may want to create a new status for your users (e.g. "Portal Users" or "Office Volunteers") and then create a generic Individual record with that status.  You can then link that Individual to the user.

  I hope that answers your question to some extent.  If not, please reply to this post and I'll try to clarify.

In Him,

-Peter Schott
 

Peter,

We have several generic portal users who are volunteers for specific ministries (e.g. College Volunteer, Women's Min Volunteer, Worship & Arts Volunteer).  Can more than one user be linked to the same generic individual record, or would I have to create a separate record for each ministry volunteer?

Donna Heusinkveld
Grace Community Church
Tempe, AZ

Hi Donna,

Unfortunately, you would not be able to link multiple individual records to one portal user account. Our suggestion would be to create an individual record called the same name as the portal user account (e.g. Ministry Volunteer (portal user) = Ministry Volunteer individual/household record). This will ensure that any people lists that are created by this portal user will be viewable by all who share this portal user ID. 

Thanks,

Lance 

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Lance Dacy
Director | Customer Services
Fellowship Technologies

Donna,

Since all IND records in a F1 database are within a Household, you might want to create a Household that contains all of the volunteer user account names.  Make their status inactive.

Scott

Lance,

We have various ministry groups that use Fellowship One for group emails. Consequently, I have created a user for that ministry so that when they send an email out it comes from the ministry and not the person. I hope that makes sense. Do I need to also create an individual record for these ministries. For example, I set up a user called "Grace Brethren" and this is the account that we send out our weekly email to attenders. Do I also need to set up an individual "Grace Brethren" account? Now that Group Email v2.0 exists is this practice necessary or can I achieve the same affect? Sorry for the change of direction in this question!

Karen Estabrook

Grace Brethren Church

Columbus, OH

Rob,

 

 

New "Groups Functionality" that is being developed in Fellowship One facilitates the access to create, manage, or view groups of individuals in the application by designating Individuals (not portal users) as having these aforementioned capabilities. (More on the reasoning for this a approach in a moment). When I say "Group Functionality", please consider the broad definition of what a group is, that is a collection of people that are associated for some reason, not just the Small Group/Home Team concept. When considering this broader definition, one can see that People Lists as they exist currently in Fellowship One is really a group. If any of your portal users, whether staff or volunteers, need to create, manage, or view People Lists, they will need to be linked to an Individual record.   

 

If you have several volunteers using a common portal login such as "volunteer1", then you may want to consider creating a Household with INDs in the HH called volunteer1, voluteer2, etc. and give them a status of Inactive so that they won't affect reporting. We fully recognize this example is not "elegant", but allow me to describe where we are going and hopefully this will excite you to the future possibilities. 

 

Your comment "We currently have alot of user's that are just volunteers..." validates what we believe is a key facet of a Dynamic Church. For churches to truly reach their community for Christ, they must empower volunteers in their  ongoing ministry efforts.  I suspect that you gave your volunteers a portal login because the functionality you needed to put into the hands of the volunteers was only available in the portal, and not in some aspect of Weblink.  Let's be honest though, the portal can be daunting to a volunteer, you are probably forced to give them access to more than you might otherwise. You would probably prefer to make their experience simple and easily learned by having a "portal lite" version of the application that only exposes the functionality they require and for the people that fall into their designated span of care.  This is the development direction of our Groups project.

 

To your question of how you delineate between staff and volunteers, there is a place where you can designate staff on the user profile page. There are also some great reports that will give you all sorts of metrics based on portal users that are Staff.

 

I hope this helps!

 

I understand the groups and wholeheartedly agree that the group capability will be easier for many of our volunteers.  Will individuals in the new group list carry a participant or staff assignment.  If will there be a way to see what groups an individual is assigned to.  Will query builder be able to access these groups.

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Dan

I understand the direction of going to the Groups functionality. From the description I got of it from Curtis Simmons it looks like a great move. I'm still not clear on why this necessitates every user being linked to an individual though.

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Rob Guilliams
Director of Computer Services
Highview Baptist Church
Louisville, KY

From reading through the pre-release notes, it appears that the permissions on people lists were tied to the portal user record, and the permissions on groups are tied to an individual record.  This means that without a tied individual account, the portal user will have no access to all groups.  There may be some portal users that could work that way, but they will be very limited in what they can do. 

Hi Karen,

We have often recommended that if you have a lot of users signing in under standard (non-descriptive) accounts, you can create a household for them and then create individuals for each user type you have under that one household. For instance, create a Grace EMail Ministry Household and then add the Children's Ministry, Youth Ministry, etc...individual users (of course you would name the individuals the same as the portal user accounts). This way, you can link the individuals with the appropriate user accounts and they will continue to have visibility to their people list (or group after JAN). I think this would be best, you could also create portal user accounts with the email address you wish the email to appear from, have one sign in that manages the emails and simply choose a delegate for the FROM so that the email appears to come from different portal users even though you are signed in to one account.

 Lance
 

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Lance Dacy
Director | Customer Services
Fellowship Technologies

Dan,

For the first iteration of Groups available to churches, just think of it as a replacement of People Lists. However, it does lay a foundation for future development that I will describe in the following paragraphs. 

With Fellowship One's currently funcationality, a "group" is formed by an individual's assignment to an Activity. What we are building is a fundamental shift in philosophy and funcationality. An individual is a in a group because you say they are that group, nothing more.  As it exists today, the assignment is the link between an activity and the individual, thereby forming a group of people. What we are doing in the new is not requiring there to be an activity for the group to exist. So, a group can be "Prayer Warriors"___ individuals at your church that don't necessarily meet at a specific date or time (activity) but are nevertheless a Group. 

In future development, we will allow you build "Events". Events can stand on their own, or be married to Groups.  This will eventually take the place of the existing activity structure.

Understanding what Groups a person belong to will be an integral aspect of Fellowship One.

Scott

I have about 250 small groups set up under Activities today.  Will these migrate to the new Groups in the January release.  Will I lose their Activity assignment and attendance if I migrate them.

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Dan

Great question! I would like to know the answer as well.

Thanks,

Debbie

The Small Groups set up under Activities today will not be migrated at this time.  In this case, you don't have to worry about Activity Assignments or Attendance changing.   The first major migration will be People Lists.  Because of that, we want to ensure that you have all of your users linked to an Individual.  If they are not linked, they will not be able to use People Lists.

In Him,

-Peter Schott