elvanto, say hello to your new friend MailChimp!
What/who is MailChimp?
Glad you asked. If you have not been lucky enough to come across MailChimp, then today’s your day. MailChimp is online software that allows you to send email marketing campaigns for free (up to a certain amount of sends per month) to people in your church. They give you all sorts features and statistics to help make your email campaigns a success. You can set-up different lists and groups within those lists. You can find out all the details and sign up on their website.
Getting set-up
You will need to go into Account Settings -> People Settings and configure the Email Marketing Integration section. You’ll need to select MailChimp as your provider, grab a copy of your API Key and paste it into the API Key field.
It will then load all of your lists and groups from your account. Select the lists and groups you’d like to be able to subscribe your people to.
Once you save your changes you can then edit people and assign to them what lists and groups they fit into.
Hope you enjoy this new feature!
Ben
Quick one today. You can now print out a list of family members, the primary and spouse’s name and also their full address.
When editing a report or people view, you now have the ability to display as individuals or families.
You can also add family related fields and addresses to your reports making it super easy to do mail merges and to discover the families in your church. Easy!
Child check-in is in the final stages and we hope to release it in the next couple of weeks!
Talk soon!
Ben
Happy New Year! Hope you all had a great holiday! I ended up camping for new years (it’s summer in Australia remember) which was a blast. Even got to see fireworks even though we were quite remote! Anyway, enough of that, some exciting updates released today leading up to the release of the Child Check-in system…
School Grades
First off the bat is built in school grades. Now under Account Settings -> People settings you can go ahead and enter your school grades. But that’s not all! elvanto will now promote children to the next school grade every year. By default this is done on the 1st January but you can change this to any date you’d prefer. More details can be found here.
Demographic Progression
This is a really cool tool that will save you a heck of a lot of time. Every church has a sequence in which people move through your church. This is the same for children in children’s ministry all the way to the more senior aged people. It can be a huge task to keep people up-to-date in their correct demographic especially when it comes to children as they are changing regularly.
To overcome this problem we have developed a system called Demographic Progression.
Don’t want to give too much away. Head on over the this help article which will give you to whole run down of how it works. You’re going to love it!
How far off is the Child Check-in system?
Both school grades and demographic progression play big roles in the up and coming Child Check-in system. We are really hoping to have the first version released by the end of the month. It’s head down tail up here at the moment. I’ll be sure to keep you posted as to when it’s released.
That’s all for now. Look forward to posting again soon!
We’ve been working on this one for a little while now and we appreciate your patience as we’ve been making the finishing touches. Financial system is now live!
You will now notice a new Financial link in the top of your Admin menu. Don’t worry, only administrators will be able to see it and you can give access using Access Permissions.
The Financial system allows you to track giving and pledges within your church. It is broken up into 3 parts: Batches, Transactions and Pledges.
Please note that it does not currently have the ability to accept payments online.
It allows you to record payments made to your church and print out reports. You can add in different payment categories (chart of accounts) and even import transactions and pledges.
We’ve written some help files to help get you started using the system which can be found here.
We have also added a Giving Statement report to ‘Reports’ under the ‘Financial’ tab. We will be expanding the reports section giving you the ability to generate more and more reports as time goes on.
It’s only 10 sleeps till Christmas here is Australia. This ‘might’ be the last time you hear from me before then so I’ll go ahead and wish you all a wonderful Christmas!
Talk to you soon!
Ben
Tired of clicking the ‘Contact Volunteers’ button to email all the volunteers scheduled on a service? Well, now you can do it automatically!
Head on over to your Account Settings -> Service Settings page in the admin, edit the settings and scroll down to the ‘Automatically email volunteers when scheduled onto a service’ heading.
Customise the email and away you go!
Automatic emails will only be sent to volunteers who have the ‘Schedule Notification’ box ticked. By default this is ticked when someone is first scheduled onto a service. If you are editing a volunteer, simply tick the box and they will receive an automatic email once you save. It will not email volunteers within a service that is not published.
It’s as easy as that!
