Now that you’ve had the new Church Database applied to your account, there’s a few things you need to do to move your account from a Volunteer System to a Church Database. This post will guide you through what you need to do to get set up.

Setting up a Church Database isn’t always a 5 minute job. Some thinking and planning should be put in place to ensure it is set-up correctly and suits your church. The great thing about elvanto is it’s flexible. As you change, so does elvanto.

 Step 1: Familiarize yourself with the new features

We’ve changed the menu slightly and added some new features so make sure you familiarize yourself with them.

The great thing is all the new feature we have added in will be hidden from pretty much everyone in the new admin until you give them access. This gives you a chance to set things up before releasing it to your church.

Step 2: Set-up some demographics

One of the new features we’ve added is demographics. This allows you to group different people in their stage of life for example. By default we’ve added Adults, Families, Youth and Children. You might have names for these areas and have more so you can go in and add as many as you like.

You can also ad sub-demographics. You might have a feature age groups under Children so you could add them as sub-demographics (e.g: 0-3, 4-6, 7-10).

Demographics can be edited from the Settigns -> Demographics menu in the Admin Area.

Step 3: Set-up your people categories

These allow you to categorise your People making them easier to manage.

To all accounts we’ve added New People, Church Members and Inactive categories for you. Once again these are just samples so you can change these as much as you like. You must have at least one People Category set-up and depending on your church this might work fine for you.

Each People Category allows you to set-up a layout for the category. You can add custom fields, add rows and columns and really customise it to suit your church. I’ve created a video that explains People Categories and how to set-up the layout.

Step 4: Create some People Views

People Views allow you to create different views based on a criteria.

So you might want to pull all the people in the Youth demographic between the ages 13 to 18 that attend your Central Campus. You can do this by creating a People View.

People Views can be accessed on the People page in the Admin Area on the right hand side.

Step 5: Set-up your groups and categories

First of all you should figure out what you are going to use groups for. Some uses could be…

1. Small/connect/life groups (whatever your terminology might be)
2. Ministries (you can store leaders or whole ministries in groups)
3. Leaders
4. Anything else that has more than one person.

Because there are so many uses for Groups we’ve added the ability to categorise them making it easier to understand what groups are what.

You could then start adding people to groups. This can be done individually through each person profile or you can mass manage a group of people and add them to a group at once.

Groups can be accessed on the Groups page in the Admin Area.

Step 6: Set-up some reports

The reporting feature is still very new and we will be continuing to enhance and improve it such as adding service statistics, charts, graphs, built in reports. But for now they are still extremely powerful and you can start using them.

Like People Views you can create a specific criteria and find all the people who match it. We’ve got an article that explains different types of reports for you.

Reports can be accessed on the Reports page in the Admin Area.

Step 7: Import your people

Now that you’ve got all your categories and fields set-up, now would be a good time to import your people.

Alternatively you can add your people in manually especially if you are wanting to refresh your database and only want to have current people in the database.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to do import if you’d like to do it now.

Step 8: Start thinking about People Flows

I’ve left this one to last because this will probably require the most thinking. People Flows are a great way to set-up processes to put people through.

Rather than me trying to explain it here I suggest you check out the video that explains how to use People Flows and how they work.

Step 9: Release it to your leaders

Now that every is set-up, release it to your leaders. You can now give everyone access to the database by editing Access Permissions and giving people access. Now that you have more features you might want to add a few more Access Permissions so that people can only view what they need.

You might also want to do an email out to notify everyone.

That’s a wrap!

Congratulations! You have now set-up your Church Database.

Be sure to contact us if you have any questions and we’d be happy to assist you further.

That’s all for now!

Ben