What a great way to stay in touch with your people and acknowledge this special occasion!

Look for this under the Personal Tab in the Query Builder Conditions. It is named Days til Anniversary.

You have an Organization (or a Tag) for contacts at churches (or businesses). The people records use the contact person in the name fields, but the church (or business) address for the preferred address. You also have the name of the church or business in the Employer field on the record. If you select these new Avery Employer labels, you have just what you need for your mailing!

By offering you this option, you do not have to put the name of the church or business on one of the actual address lines. We are doing that for you with these labels.

The labels look like this:

Rev. Peter Pastor
First Church
2000 Main St
Big City, TN  38888

You can read about all of the various types of labels in the help article about the Toolbar.

Karen

Check it out. From an Organization, from Query Builder results, or from Manage Tags (anywhere that you see the green toolbar) you now have two new options under Reports: Picture Directory and Family Directory.

In literally seconds, your directory will appear as a Word document, ready for you to email to the group or even post on your website (save it as a PDF first).

Of course, you still have the option to create your own phone list, picture directory, etc. by using the Excel Exports. But I’m confident you will love this new quick and easy way to generate a great looking directory for any group of people with just a click of your mouse.

Read more and see a sample Picture Directory.

Read more and see a sample Family Directory.

Thanks, David. This is very cool!

Karen

Some possible Types for Organizations would be as follows:

Class – for Sunday School, small groups, discipleship groups

Event – conferences, workshops, any kind of special event

Trip – camps, mission trips, senior adult trips

Volunteer – for all your ushers, valet parking attendants, nursery workers

Committee – for committees (duh!)

You decide what works best for your church. Maybe you just want to ‘type’ them very broadly by using types such as Education, Service and Fellowship to distinguish between groups in which a person is receiving teaching (Sunday School, small groups) – Education; groups in which they are doing some type of service for others (Ushers, Mission Trip volunteers) – Service; and groups designed for interaction (camps, trips, ball teams) – Fellowship.

Think about how you will use this before you start creating the Organization Types. You may not need this feature. However, churches will a lot of Organizations will greatly benefit from it.

Once you have created the Organization Types and assigned them to the appropriate Organizations, then what? Glad you asked! Now you can filter for specific Org Types on Organization Search. You can query for individuals enrolled in a specific Type of Organization. Also, on a person’s Enrollment list, you will see that we group Organizations by Type in the list of Active Enrollments. So you can tell at a glance the kinds of Organization in which a person is involved.

Read more about Organization Types and how to create them.

RegisterLink2 is just in time for the big Vacation Bible School email we send out this time each year. With this new link, you can email the parents of your youngsters, and when the parent clicks the Register Now link, they will see their family displayed in a list. All they have to do is select the family member to register and then complete the form. BVCMS already knows who they are, so we are able to display that list for their convenience. Sweet, huh? Read more about RegisterLinks!

RSVPLink is a great feature for those Organizations in which the members are already enrolled, but need to RSVP before the specific meetings. Example: you have a large group of people who meet monthly for  a Bible study and you need to know how many to expect at each meeting. Send the RSVPLink and let them RSVP (register) for the meeting! This does not mark them present, merely ‘registered’ for that specific meeting. Read more!

Karen

Not sure what I’m talking about regarding public emails and posting emails on Facebook? Read all about it – including this new feature.

Set up your registration, enter the Start and End Dates and rest assured that no one will be able to register (even if the link is posted) except between those dates. This means that you can advertise that registration ends at 11:00 PM on a specific date and you don’t have to be sitting at your computer to end the registration right at that time. BVCMS will do it for you!

Also, you can go ahead and put the Register Now link on your website, advertising that your registration begins at 2:00 AM on a given date,  and rest easy. No one will be able to register until that date and time.

What happens when someone clicks a link on a date that is outside your start and end dates? They will see this message: “Sorry, registration is not available at this time.”

One more little goody – check out the Try Registration button now (under Other Management). Notice the added prompt which reminds you to copy the link in order to check out your registration without being logged in as yourself. Just a little thing, but I really like it!

Karen

However, you still handle returned checks and reversals/corrections the same as before. The only difference is that you click a link at the bottom of the page in order to view those links now. You still go to the contributions page for the individual for whom you need to make the return or reversal. Once you select the contributions for the correct year, just scroll to the bottom of the page and click returns/reversals. This will cause the links to appear beside each contribution. Just click the appropriate one – either Return or Reverse – to complete the transaction.

Oh, also – we are now providing more information beside the returned/reversed transaction. In the Notes field, you will see something like “Returned Check for Contribution ID = 12345″

Read more about Returned Checks and Reversals (Corrections).

Karen

Well, this new feature is truly for those with Admin rights on their BVCMS database. You all know that there are times when you need to experience what a user is experiencing on BVCMS, to see what they are seeing. We’ve always had a way to impersonate users, but now we have made that SO much easier.

Just go to the user’s People Record and then to the System > User tab. Notice next to their username there is an impersonate button. Just click that and the system will log you on as that user. Pretty drop-dead simple, huh? When you are finished, just log out as that user and log back on as yourself.

Remember, if that user had either OrgMembersOnly or OrgLeadersOnly rights, you will need to click the toggle under the Admin menu to turn those off after you log back on as yourself.
Also it won’t allow you impersonate a Finance user if you don’t also have that Role.

By the way, we’ll be disabling the old impersonate method. It was somewhat of a security hole we needed to close up anyway.

We added the Clear Active Tag feature to make it easy for you to use your Active Tag from wherever you are without have to return to the Manage Tags page in order to remove everyone from the Tag.

Here’s an example of why we did this:

Let’s say that your Active Tag is the Unnamed Tag, but you don’t remember if there is anyone still in that Tag or not. You are on Query Builder and want to add everyone from your query to that Tag. Now, instead of having to go back to Manage Tags, remove anyone still in the Tag and then run your query again, all you have to do is select Clear Active Tag and then select Add All from the Toolbar.

Maybe that isn’t a big deal, but it is one more example of how we are always looking for ways to make your life easier.