Church Community Builder 4.1 is coming June 24, and it's a big one. There's even more to it than the user experience changes we talked about in the main blog.
Edit 6.4.15: Two small new report features added.
Edit 6.12.15: The Reports page has been reorganized, and custom reports can now be scheduled.
School Grade Dropdown
Sometimes open text fields for profiles can be really useful ... and sometimes not. The School Grade profile field is now a customizable drop-down list, enabling you to standardize options and prevent the system from listing students in First, 1st, and 1 Grades (and that one "forst" tha never got fixed).
When you edit a profile, you can find the new drop-down list beside the School Grade label in the Plugged In tab. By default, the list will be populated with any School Grade text that has been previously saved to a profile, so you won't lose any data in the switch. The list can easily be cleaned up in Customizable Fields.
Even better, the new pulldown is now a sort option for Group Promotion! When you have a group of 5th and 6th graders and you need to move all 6th graders up to the Middle School group, now you can sort the group member list by School Grade. The 6th graders come right to the top and it's easy to get the right kids into the right group.
Send Mail Merges on Someone Else's Behalf
Wouldn't it be grand to be able to give your trusted assistant or colleague the ability to send an email in your name? Now, if you're the MA or have the Mail Merge privilege, you can set other users to be able to send a mail merge on your behalf. From the name on the email to where replies are sent, recipients will never know you didn't click 'send' personally.
Archive Forms
We created forms to be made and used for your ministries. And you are using them. A lot of them. And sometimes it's hard to find the form you need to finish creating in a long list of inactive forms — unless, of course, you're one of the people who have mastered the art of strict form naming conventions. We heard your cry for help, and now, help has arrived with the introduction of Archived Forms.
If you have administrative access to a form (as the MA, a Form Admin, or a Form Manager), you can now archive that form from three years ago and move it off your Inactive list. You will find the archive option under the Actions menu. Archived forms can still be edited and managed as normal, and can easily be restored for reuse at any time.
With the addition of Archived Forms, you can now use your Inactive list as a sort of work table. It will hold forms that are complete and set to be published at a future date, those that are still being created, and those that are closed but still need some work managing the responses, while the archive will hold those forms no longer in use. Because, let's face it, who still needs to see VBS Registration from 2012?
Archive Processes
Processes have been a powerful tool in the software, helping you lead volunteers, take care of first-time guests, and more. That 'more' also included being great audition material for the day they make a digital Hoarders show. So, like with Forms, we're giving you the tools to clean up a little via archiving.
If you have administrative access to a Process (as the MA, a Process Admin, or a Process Manager), you can get it off your list and into the new Archived section. This archives the entire Process, not individual Queues, and just like with archived forms, you can restore the archived Process at any time. Concerned that someone might be added to an archived Process automatically from a form or another Process? Don't worry — archived Processes and their Queues won't be available as automation options, and you'll be notified if you try to archive a Process connected to a form automation. When you're done with a Process, the archive tool lets you disconnect it from the rest of your software and put it away.
Public Group Finder Makeover
Promoting your church's groups in your community is important ... so it was time to get our public web tool for finding groups some improvements.
Before, you needed to select one or more criteria, click search, and wait for the results to load. If you didn't find the right group, you had to start over. Now, each of those criteria works as a near instantaneous filter. When you select Tuesday as your preferred meeting day, the list of groups is immediately filtered for all groups that meet on Tuesday. Need child care? Click that button and the list filters again. Each filter narrows the results until you find the groups you're looking for, and removing a filter is as easy as a click.
On top of that, the group finder is getting a makeover to look better than ever. Your groups can be your church's face in your community — let's show our best one.
Better Reports Organization
Not only is it easier for your churchgoers or visitors to find groups now, it's also easier for you and your other leaders to find the reports they need! The Reports page has been broken into two tabs, one for system reports and one for custom reports and saved reports. Both tabs are organized by category like you expect.
And as the cherry on top of this icing, custom reports can now be scheduled, too!
Bug Fixes & Usability Improvements
Check-In
- No Allergies confirmation for family creation: When we introduced the check-in concept of confirmed no allergies, we neglected to include it as part of creating a new family. So, with this release we added this to the family creation process.
Events & Attendance
- Long past attendance recording: When taking attendance for an all-day event whose start date was from 2012 or further back, attendance was being recorded for the wrong occurrence. We fixed this issue.
- Coaches and Directors receiving event summary email: When taking attendance and selecting the option to send a summary to group leadership, the software was not including Coaches and Directors on the event summary email. We fixed this so all group leadership receives the event summary email now.
- Event approval: In some rare circumstances when approving an event, the page would not reload and remove the event you just approved. We fixed this issue.
- Event guest list search results: On the second page of search results for an event guest list, the results were not being filtered according to the search parameters. This has been fixed.
Financial
- Donor analysis report: The donor analysis report now again generates the correct results when using more than one campus.
Forms
- Admin notifications: On form creation, if you set someone to receive administrative notifications for a form, these settings were not saving. We fixed this so on both form creation and form edit, administrative notifications will be saved appropriately.
- Changing form respondents: Changing the respondent for a form while logged in was not appropriately updating some of the profile fields in the form. We fixed this issue.
- Chrome autofill: When using the Chrome browser, Chrome’s autofill feature was not working with forms in some cases. We've mediated so Forms and Chrome play nicely together.
- Anonymous forms: When using a form without contact fields, all submissions to this form should be anonymous. However, if the person responding to the form was logged in, the form manager would see their name on their submission. We fixed this so forms without contact information are truly anonymous.
Groups
- Weekly group summary email: We simplified the weekly summary email for your groups. They now show the date and the text "Weekly Summary".
Leadership Roles
- Role explanations: We added a link from the leadership roles page to help give some explanation about what we mean when we talk about leadership roles in Church Community Builder software.
Mail Merges
- Spanish characters displaying: In some cases, a print version of a mail merge in Spanish was not appropriately displaying the characters. Our mail merges have received some language lessons and will no longer make these mistakes.
Mobile
- Phone numbers and mobile login: When using the mobile login, phone numbers were not displaying, even if they should have been visible based on privacy settings. We fixed this so phone numbers display when privacy settings allow.
People Search
- New givers search results: In some cases, the new givers people search was not returning the expected results. We fixed this issue so going forward you should truly only see first-time givers in your search results.
Profiles
- Editing family members' profiles: The Primary Contact and Spouse should be able to edit any of their family members' non-admin profile fields. This was broken, and has been fixed.
Reports
- Edit 6/4/15: Donor Analysis report: There is now an option in the Donor Analysis report to show the total number of transactions, instead of just the total dollar amount, which was the previous default.
- Edit 6/4/15: Printable Directoy: We added the option to include emails in your Printable Directory report, as well as a few other changes to improve your experience with this report.
- Attendance Summary report: In some cases with a large set of data, the Attendance Summary report was not showing results. We fixed this issue so this report should show results even with large data sets.
Schedules & Positions
- Declined serving replacement requests: When finding a replacement for your confirmed serving assignment, we are now keeping replacements who decline in the schedule as declined. This way when you go to find another replacement this same person does not show up as an option anymore.
- Long text getting cut off: In cases with a long position name or description, invitation emails were declaring "tl;dr" and cutting off some of the text. The emails have been given a lesson in manners and will no longer cut off text.
- Long names getting cut off: When viewing your volunteers assigned to a schedule, long profile names were getting cut off. The entire name displays now.
- Inactivated volunteers: When a profile is assigned to a volunteer schedule and then becomes inactive, we are no longer sending the serving reminder two days before the first commitment.
API
- Create_individual and update_individual: We added marital_status to the create_ and update_individual api services.
- Resource_list: We added a new service: resource_list. This service allows you to view basic information about rooms and resources.
- Attendance_profiles: We added a new service which returns multiple attendance profiles. The service is called attendance_profiles. It has two required parameters (start_date and end_date) and no optional parameters. The output follows that of attendance_profile.
- Individual_fit: We added a new service called individual_fit. This service shows you the spiritual_gifts, abilities, and passions for individuals.
- Form_list: We added a parameter to the form_list service which allows you to exclude archived forms.
- Create_event: We added a parameter to the create_event service called uses_resources.
- Individual_profiles pagination: We added pagination to the individual_profiles service through the optional parameters page and per_page. If per_page is set, page defaults to 1. If page is set, per_page defaults to 25. If both are set, the defaults are ignored. Additionally, we fixed the returned count to properly include/exclude inactive profiles.
- Group_profiles pagination: We added pagination to the group_profiles service through the optional parameters page and per_page. If per_page is set, page defaults to 1. If page is set, per_page defaults to 25. If both are set, the defaults are ignored.
- Event_profiles pagination: We added pagination to the event_profiles service through the optional parameters page and per_page. If per_page is set, page defaults to 1. If page is set, per_page defaults to 25. If both are set, the defaults are ignored.
- Api_status: We added a new service called api_status. All API users with a username and password can run it and see the last_run_date for any api service, the number of calls made during that date, and the daily limit for calls. This does not count against the daily limit.
- Event_profile and event_profiles: We added an optional parameter, include_guest_list, to the event_profile and event_profiles services. If set to true, the service will provide the following information about the guests: ID, name, contact phone, primary email, and status.