That mission becomes especially challenging when it comes to reports. Church staff often want reports with specific criteria (perhaps a report that includes everyone from a specific town with their cell phone numbers).

We try to accommodate clients as much as we can with our regular reports. Most report windows have somewhere from 10 to 30 different reports you can run, and most reports have filters that allow for you to do some customization.

But, the report lists are getting long enough that it can be hard just looking through them to find what you want, and sometimes clients still can’t get the report they need for a specific purpose.

That’s where custom reports come in.

Using Beta Custom Reports

We need to emphasize the beta here because the Custom Reports window is still in a developmental stage. But it has come a long way since its initial release late last year and is really opening up some exciting possibilities.

It works like this:

1. Go to System: System Tools: Custom Reports.

2. Choose your Data type. Custom Reports has various formats under the categories AR, AP, Contributions, GL, Groups, Membership and Web. (screenshot)

3. Choose your Sort field to define how the report will be sorted (e.g. members’ cities in a – z alphabetical order). (screenshot)

4. Under Fields select what data fields you want to include in the report. (screenshot)

5. Scrolling to the right with the top scroll bar, you can add a Filter (e.g. only including people with last names in the a – j range). (screenshot)

6. Under Search, you can further filter your report by only including lines with a certain name, word or number. For instance, if you type in a certain zip code, only members with that zip code will show up on the report. (screenshot)

The display under your selections lets you see the data you’re producing as you make those selections.

Under File in the upper left of the window, you can save the report you’ve created. Now this doesn’t actually save the report data (the member addresses or such); it saves the fields and filters you’ve chosen. That way, if you come back to print the report later (by going to File and Open), the report will reflect any updates you’ve made to the member or financial information.

Also under File are the options to save or export the report. You can export in three different formats: Excel, XML or JSON.

An Example

Let’s say you want a report that lists members that live in the church’s zip code and have a status of Visitor. You want the report to group the members by their city and include their addresses, household phone numbers, and household email addresses.

You can get your report by following these steps:

1. Data – Choose Membership:Directory.

2. Sort – Choose City and set it to A -> Z (or reverse if you prefer).

3. Fields – Check only the boxes in this screenshot.

4. Filter – Choose Status and set both boxes below it to Visitor.

5. Search – Type in the church’s zip code.

You can now go to File to print the report or export it in your desired format.

Maybe you decide that you want to limit the report to just two of the cities in the area. You can export to Excel and then delete the blocks of lines grouped together for the undesired cities.

Security

You may not have access to this new window. Talk to your database’s administrator about getting access to custom reports.

In fact, you administrators may also need to give yourselves access to the window by going to either System: Security: Membership or System: Security: Fund Accounting.

Note that no user will be able to run reports on data that they haven’t been given access to in the other windows. So for instance, if someone hasn’t been given access to view members’ contribution data in the Contributions module, that person won’t be able to run any reports on Contributions in the Custom Reports window.

Tell us what you think.

With Custom Reports, you have the freedom to build your own reports to serve your church’s specific needs.

This tool also greatly reduces the need to create spreadsheets and do all kinds of acrobatic, contortionist procedures on them.

As our custom report window advances, we’re sure it will become an increasingly useful tool and a growing part of our mission to fully serve each and every church.

Try out Custom Reports. Let us know how the reports are working for you, in what situations they are proving especially useful, and what features you would like to see added. Please leave comments on this post and also in the Support Forum (under ‘?help!’ in the upper right of your account screen).

Export Your Address Information from IconCMO

Go to People: Households: Hse-Export

Choose the “Address Information” report

Choose a household status

Click the “Export Data” button

Format the Data

Delete or hide columns A (the household names) and C. Column C is ‘Address Line 2’ which is typically reserved for things like the apartment number. This information is not needed for the map.

Insert a row at the top and add headers for the remaining columns (address, city, state, zip)

Highlight the data in columns B through F

Copy the highlighted data to your clipboard (ctrl+c)

Make a Map

Go to http://batchgeo.com/

Paste your data into BatchGeo (ctrl+v)

Click the “Validate & Set Options” button

Review to make sure everything matches correctly

Click the “Make Map” button

You’re done!

Photo Credit: aussiegall via Compfight cc

You can see my sample map here:

http://batchgeo.com/map/064d405d172d30e5bba4ee4b691a7b49

You may notice some of the addresses in my example are not accurately mapped (e.g. a Newport, WA address showing up near Vancouver). This is because the addresses I used are completely made up and that is confusing Google Maps. When you use real addresses from your database, the map should look much better.

*Icon Systems is not affiliated with or partnered with BatchGeo. But we think it is a pretty amazing resource to know about and hope you find it helpful.

Don’t have IconCMO? Sign up for a FREE 10-day trial.

For churches, communicating well with members is crucial, so our member and group emailing features are an important part of our service.

Our recent changes to the CMO emailing system will give a big boost to the performance of our email features, helping your church communicate and stay connected.

Your emails are now processed on a separate server farm, so they no longer share bandwidth with the regular CMO servers. That way, emails can be handled faster, especially large email blasts and emails with attachments. The change also allows IconCMO to operate at optimal capacity regardless of whether large volumes of emails are being sent.

“Messages Queued:_”

We’ve also changed the message that comes up when you send emails. The message used to say “Emails Sent,” but that’s not quite accurate.

You see, email servers handle emails on a first-come-first-served basis. So if the server receives 10,000 emails, it puts them in what is called a queue (pronounced like “cue”) and prioritized. The queue is like an email waiting room, and the emails are sent out in the same order they come in.

That’s why the new message says “Messages Queued” – to more accurately describe what’s happening. The message also gives a number so you know how many emails have been sent to the server’s queue.

Failed Emails

We’ve added another feature. If any of your emails fail, you’ll receive an email back confirming what emails failed and why. Below is an example of such a message.

Sample Message for Failed Emails

These changes should better your CMO emailing experience and make it easier to keep people informed.

We wanted to inform our clients that in 2013, we have replaced every server that the IconCMO application runs on for our clients. We have also replaced the servers for the blog and website.

All the servers that are in the current setup have a terabyte (TB) or more of data storage.

Note: this photo was taken by Ronnie Garcia. It is not a photo of actual Icon Systems servers.

Some fun facts to give everyone an idea of how much 1 TB is:

1. 50,000 trees made into paper and printed is equal to 1 TB.

2. Having 1,000 copies of the full edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is equal to 1 TB.

3. 1 TB can hold a million minutes of MP3 music.

4. 1 TB can remember 8,000 times more data than the average human.

5. Wikipedia’s raw data dump of the entire site on Jan 2010 was 5.87 TB’s.

6. The first 20 years worth of observation by the Hubble Space Telescope amassed a little more than 45 TB’s of data.

7. As of April 2011, the Library of Congress has collected about 235 TB’s of data total and adds about 5 TB’s per month.

Now that we have established that a TB is a lot of data, rest assured Icon Systems has numerous servers that make up the entire server architecture to house each clients’ data. This means our clients have at their disposal many TB’s of space to use on IconCMO.

In addition to the hardware updates, we also updated all the software that is used to create the reports, the servers’ operating system, and other programming tools to the latest version available. With these software updates for the report generation and other tools, our programmers will be able to deploy faster solutions on the system.

After all the software was updated, we migrated all of our clients’ databases to the new servers including the backups. Once we migrated the data and planned the roll over in the wee hours of the morning, it only took 10 minutes to physically switch out all the servers in the data warehouse!

Our commitment to our clients is paramount and with these improvements to IconCMO, we hope our clients know we are on their side.

With the last day of school right around the corner, churches are starting to plan for Vacation Bible School (VBS). IconCMO can help you manage the attendees and their grade levels so you can focus your planning on what’s important – preparing the curriculum for the children.

Groups can be created for any Households or Members whom you wish to maintain as a list. For example, you can create a household list for your newsletters, or a member group of the men’s choir.

Locate Existing Group

If your organization is already using the group module to keep track of your Sunday school students, or you used the system to keep track of your VBS students last year, you can easily copy members from one group to another.

Under People: Groups: Grp-Members, the example below indicates there is already a group created for Grade 1 in the category Sunday school.

Create a New Group

The information from this group can be transferred over into a new category created for Vacation Bible School and edited to contain only the Grade 1 students signed up to attend. Click Group Category under Add New. Name the new category, for example VBS. Click on the new category you just created, VBS, and then click Group under Add New. This will allow you to create the grade levels within the VBS category, such as Grade 1 – Bible School.

Copy Group Members

Highlight the new group by clicking on it, next click Group Copy under Group Options. Select the category and group you wish to copy the members from, and click Process Selection. You have now copied the Grade 1 members from Sunday school to VBS.

To learn how to record allergies and emergency contact info which may be beneficial for VBS, please visit our prior blog: How to Record Allergies and Emergency Contact Information.

Antique Phone

Let’s face it – printed directories can be a pain. People’s lives are always changing, and so are their phone numbers, addresses, family relations, email addresses, memberships, and so on. The printed directories that church staffers create can feel outdated by the time they get into the hands of the members.

Not to mention, printed directories take time to make and use up a lot of paper and printer ink. You can have directories made professionally, but that can get quite pricey.

Then, as changes occur between printings, often the only way to keep people updated about changes is to print updates in church bulletins, etc., and hope that people actually get the updates and record them.

And what about the new comer who gets a three-year old picture directory from before dozens of membership changes occurred, before toddlers became preschoolers, before ten or so young adults moved into homes of their own?

Consider the advantages of an online directory.

• With an online, web-based directory like the one in your IconCMO account, you can easily update the directory as changes happen, so that members can always view an updated, accurate picture directory.
• You can give members the ability to enter and update their own information, relieving some of the work and stress on the church staff.
• As new members become part of the church community, you can use existing pictures or take new ones at any time to import into their family file, making it easier for the current membership to look them up and remember their names and info.

Giving members access through the parishioner’s module

The first step is to give members access to their own parishioner log in.

• The members first need to have household email addresses recorded in the system in People: Households: Hse-List.
• If you want to include members’ pictures on the directory, you can enter these by going to People: Households: Hse-Pictures. Here, you can click on a household and then click “Browse” to locate any pictures you have saved for the household. Find the one you want and click “Save Picture”, and the picture will be available on the online picture directory.
  

  Importing Photos

  
  

• Go to Web Services: WS Setup: Parishioner Security and look up whomever you want, then click on their Access Type to change it from “No-Access”. If you give them “Read-Write”, they can change their contact information; if you give them “Read-Only”, they can’t.
• Then, click “Send Email” to send an email to the person you just changed. The email will give them the church’s phone number and a username and password so they can log into the parishioner’s module. The first time through – when you’ll likely be changing and emailing much of the membership – you can click “Send All Emails” to send emails to everyone who’s given access.

Parishioner Security

In order to log in, the members will go to the same place in the IconCMO website that regular users use to log in. Or, the church can make it easier for them by putting a link on the church’s website, so that members can just click on a link or an icon on the church website to be taken to iconcmo.com/login.

Once in, members can use the buttons near the top of the window to review their own member, household and contribution information, to change their own username and password in “Security Settings”, and of course to view the online directory.

Parishioner’s Module Online Directory

Website Integration

That’s how members get into the online directory in the Parishioner’s Module. For a more stylish, integrated presentation, you can integrate the online directory with your church’s website. You’ll find that this version of the online directory has a really nice, sharp-looking interface. To check out this option and see instructions, follow this link to our website.

You can also install the integrated directory on a self-hosted WordPress site. Learn more here.

The IconCMO online picture directory is just one more way that the IconCMO church management solution helps churches achieve efficient, convenient communication. It’s a valuable tool for church members, and it frees the church staff and leaders to spend more time doing what’s most important to them – ministering to people.

How do you handle communications when you have a last-minute cancellation?

With IconCMO, we have simplified the process of reaching out to your members. You can send an email to the parents of preschoolers reminding them to bring egg cartons for a Sunday School project, or remind your Youth Group of an upcoming retreat with a text, all with just a few clicks in the system.

The group module is used to create groups of members or households, send text messages to group members, email members of a group, create events for a group and maintain group event attendance. This tutorial will walk through sending text messages and emails.

Texting a group

In order to send a text message to a member, the member record must contain a cell phone number with the provider selected. If no cell phone provider is selected, a message cannot be sent in the correct format for the member’s phone to receive the text message. For more information on setting up membership preferences, please view our Membership Setup Guide.

Select the group you are sending the text message to in the Grp-Members window. Next, click the Instant Message button. Enter the message you want to send as a text in the Instant Message window. Make sure to keep it brief. Then click Send Text Message.

Emailing a Group

Locate the group you wish to send an email to under the Grp-Members or Grp-Households screen. Once you have the group name selected, click Group Email.

When sending a group email, you have the option of choosing which email address in the system to use. You can select the household email or a member email address. You can also include attachments or print labels for group members without email addresses. To view a report of the emails that were successfully sent, to to Grp-Reports.  Select the report type Email Status Report and select the email date, then click show report.

Additional Email Options with our Partners

Our partnership with Constant Contact allows you to export email lists for access to professional templates, personalization features, and email statistics.

If you would like to email a video to your group, we also have a partnership with BombBomb. BombBomb makes it easy to connect with and build stronger relationships with your members through video email.

Communicate with your group members fast by sending simplified communications via text and email through IconCMO.

If you have any questions please call a Support Technician at 218-236-1899, or send us an email at support@iconcmo.com.

• You have an interested audience.
• You have wealth of valuable information to share.
• And you have an unparalleled platform – your blog – that enables you to easily share and publish your good news.

But what makes a good blog post?

Does it need to be long and deep and insightful? Or can it be a short, quick and to the point? (No and yes!)

A blog can be a wonderful tool to demonstrate your knowledge within your community. It’s your publishing platform to inform, entertain and educate your congregation members, or anyone, really, who takes an interest in what you have to say.

We recently came across this helpful infographic that serves as a blueprint for creating blog posts that really resonate with your readers. Our thanks to Church Tech Today for modifying this infographic for church audiences and to business2community.com for originating this content.

Follow it and you’ll be well on your way to delivering great content that is …

• Focused on one theme
• Gives readers what they crave
• Is short and to the point
• Includes images or video
• Includes a wealth of keywords and tags
• Prompts reader comments and interaction

The Aurora Blog by LiveEdit, an Icon Systems technology partner, is a powerful tool for publishing interesting, dynamic and search-engine rich content – all without any specific technical knowledge.

Publishing new content on a fairly frequent schedule will help you get the most out of your online presence. Fresh content helps you in several ways:

Blogging adds rich content to your website

An Aurora blog provides another keyword-optimized page for the search engines to look at, it furnishes an extra set of title tags for the search engines to index, and it offers one more way for people to find you.

Blogging updates your site with fresh content

People want fresh information. So do search engines. Making regular updates sends the message that you are an active and engaging site.

With Aurora, every blog post generates a new URL for search engines to crawl. It gives readers something to which they can link and subscribe. Each post also provides an opportunity to link to other pages within your website, which in turn increases the value of your entire site.

Blogging brings you backlinks

Whether it’s through social media, blog comments or links to your blog from other sites, sharing increases your standing with search engines, make you more visible to readers, and helps you spread your content throughout the web.

And sharing your content socially is a breeze with Aurora. You can easily post your dynamic Aurora Blog content directly to your Facebook Timeline/Wall or your Twitter feed without needing to log in to your separate social media accounts.

Publishing to a blog is one of the most effective ways to raise your visibility and increase readership. If you want to boost the SEO power of your website, spread your message and showcase your knowledge, a blog is a simple solution.

This is a guest post from one of our partner companies, LiveEdit Aurora

To speak more with someone about how you can benefit from an integrated website blog or other outreach features LiveEdit Aurora offers, just head on over to http://icon.liveeditaurora.com/pages/contact-us and fill out a short form so they can contact you!

Photo Credit: Memotions via Compfight cc

You may be tempted to include the payments in with the regular offerings, but there’s just one little problem with that. You put an IRS disclosure on your contribution statements saying something along the lines of “No goods or services were provided by the church in return for the contribution.”

Which poses another question: Can someone deduct charitable contributions, even if they receive something in return?

If you make a contribution to an organization and receive something in return, you may still be able to get a deduction on your taxes. However, your deduction is limited to the excess of what you gave over the value of what you received. For example, if you gave $100 to a charity dinner and the dinner was worth $30, you can deduct $70. If you make a contribution of more than $75 and receive goods or services, the charity must give you a written statement that tells you the value of those goods or services.

For more information regarding charitable contributions and potential tax benefits, visit the IRS Web site and search Publication 526.

Source: Legal Zoom

So if you aren’t supposed to include Easter lily money in with the regular contributions, then how do they get recorded in IconCMO?

The first step is to go to the Contributions: Management: Cont-Maintenance window. Set up a new fund named ‘Easter Lilies’ and label it as a taxable fund.

Next, use the Easter Lilies fund when recording the transactions in a batch.

You can put a comment stating the value of the plant if they donated above and beyond the value. Then they can use the difference as a tax deduction.

Any transactions recorded to the Easter Lilies fund will not show on the regular contribution statements; however, you can print a separate statement for your taxable fund(s) if you’d like. This option is in the Contributions: Management: Cont-Statements window.

Preview Sample Easter Lily Statement

That’s it!

And this isn’t just limited to Easter lilies, it can be used for any type of church fundraiser (e.g. bake sales, auctions, car washes). For additional information on donation guidelines, visit our the Church Guide on our website.

As always, the information presented on this Site should not be construed as legal, tax or accounting advice. You should consult with a professional adviser familiar with your particular situation for advice concerning specific tax or other matters before making any decisions.

Photo by Alan Witikoski

Are you hoping for a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow or are you planning to catch the elusive leprechaun? If you aren’t feeling lucky, a sure way to turn pledges into contributions is to provide quarterly giving statements to your members.

Let’s face it, your members do not wake up thinking about what they have pledged and given to your organization. Why not give them a visual reminder to help stay on track for the year?

Here are some ideas of what to include in your quarterly statements:

Pledge amount

Several organizations request a pledge from members to help set their financial goals. However, many times the pledge amount is collected months before the giving period starts. Have your members forgotten what they pledged?

Contribution totals

This shows the member how much they have given year to date. It is very important for your members to see what they have given on paper. Are they in line to meet the goal of their annual pledge? This will help them see reality.

Invitation

Invite your members to continue to give. Provide an envelope for their next contribution, or include instructions for online giving. Ask them to do something, not just read something.

Quarterly statements are typically sent out the beginning of the month following the end of the quarter. For example the first quarter ends March 31st. After your March 31st contributions have been posted you should make the statements available the beginning of April. Also set calendar reminders for July and October.

Good Luck! Although with Quarterly Statements you won’t need any.

For instructions on creating Contribution Statements in IconCMO, please visit our prior blog post The IRS and Your Contribution Statements.