We’ve focused on bringing the most important elements to this first version of the Church Database. We’ll continue to add more over the coming weeks but for now here’s what’s new in elvanto…

People

The first major change we’ve added is People. Before all you could store were your volunteers but we’ve now expanded elvanto to store everyone in your church.

When viewing a person you can now track changes made to their account, write notes about them (shared or private notes), link family members and choose whether they are a volunteer or not.

You can also add your own custom fields and design the layout the way you want it so that it’s customised to your church.

Demographics

We have added in a new feature called 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 managed from the Settings menu in the Admin Area.

People Views

Looking for a specific group of people?

Well, we’ve created People Views that allows you to specify a criteria of who you are looking for and it will find all the people who match it.

For example you might want to find everyone between the ages of 20-30 that attend your Central Campus and have been apart of the church for more than 6 months.

In under a minute you can create a People View using that criteria and generate a list of all the people who match it!

People Categories

These allow you to categorise your People making them easier to manage. So for example you could create New People, Church Members and Inactive categories and store people who fit in each.

This will be better for a number of reasons including when it comes to reporting and managing your database.

People Flows

Now these are powerful! People Flows allow you to create a process that you put people through to get them from point A to point B.

An example of this is new people who visit your church. You goal might be to get them connected into the church and become apart of a small group. You could create a People Flow that guides them through this process.

I’ve created a short video explaining how People Flows work.

Groups

Groups, groups, groups! We all have them. You can now add people to groups in the new elvanto.

The great thing is you can categorise your groups meaning you can use groups for a range of purposes.

You could create a category called Small Groups and place all the groups that relate within it. You could then create a category called Ministries and add all the ministry groups within it. Same with Courses your church might run.

As you can see Groups can be used for anything in your church that has more than one person.

Reports

You can now generate reports! Similar to People Views you can specify a criteria of what you want to report on and it will print you out a list of people. You can then export reports to CSV or PDF.

We have also build in the ability to create Comprehensive Reports which basically allows you to join a bunch of different reports into one. This is handy for creating reports for your Senior Pastors.

Reports also have a range of sharing options so only the people who need to see a certain report can. You can generate a web link for a report and email it to someone to view.

Financial (coming soon)

We are still working on this feature but it will be here there soon. elvanto will allow you to track your giving and pledges. Because it’s linked to your church database it will be easy to print out receipts and track who’s given what. Stay tuned!

And there’s so much more…

That’s just the major changes. We’ve added so many cool little features in we know you’ll love.

If you’d like to read about how to set-up your account to start using the Church Database effectively, check this article out.

Look forward to seeing your churches grow and expand because you have a powerful database to enhance what you do