Getting started with ChurchSuite
Welcome to ChurchSuite! You may be wondering where to begin or what to do first. While there isn't a "hard and fast" right way, the following suggestions may help give some pointers and you get started.
Just to say, very little setup is required to get started with adding people to the Address Book. This article is intended to be a checklist - not in any particular order - that can be worked through step-by-step over time and at a pace that suits you. Here's a short "getting started" video...
Introduction to ChurchSuite terminology
Whether you're transitioning from another church management system or completely new to systems like ChurchSuite, it will be helpful to understand the key terminology used throughout the platform. This same terminology is used across our support articles and by the ChurchSuite Customer Support team when responding to a support request.
The ChurchSuite Ecosystem...
ChurchSuite is your admin-facing system - the blue-bannered system with our modules shown across the top of the page. Your ChurchSuite account is only accessible by authorised users who have been granted login permissions to access and manage the data in those modules. Typically this will be members of your staff, pastoral, ops, and admin team, and possibly other key volunteers and leaders who have certain responsibilities within your church. Users log into ChurchSuite with their username and password. Multi-factor authentication can also be enabled for additional verification.
My ChurchSuite is the member-facing side of ChurchSuite, designed to be made available to church members. who can be invited to use My ChurchSuite to manage their personal details, view and manage rotas, engage with your events and small groups, and where parents can manage their own children's details. The customisable functionality that you can make available through My ChurchSuite is dependent on the modules that you have on your ChurchSuite account and the My ChurchSuite module settings you choose to set. Access can be granted to those in your ChurchSuite Address Book and Children modules, logging in with their email address and password.
Connect is ChurchSuite's in-person system that is designed for use at in-person services and events. Connect includes the Child Check-in system but also includes other applications that can be run from your in-person Information Desk on a tablet or laptop. One of the Connect applications is the "My Details" form - a newcomer connect form for visiting families and individuals, enabling them to connect with your church by submitting their contact details and areas of interest through a secure form. The collected information is added to your ChurchSuite modules, with automated notifications notifications to key ministry leaders. Other Connect applications are designed to enable people to view and optionally sign up for events and small groups and to make an online donation.
Embed refers to the ChurchSuite's web-embeddable features, which are easy to deploy with minimal technical know-how. Embedded content on your website remains up to date as the data in the underlying ChurchSuite modules change, meaning you don't need to update things in two places. You can embed your church's events calendar, a featured events feed, small group lists and maps, an online giving Donate form, and a newcomer connect form called 'My Details'.
Donate is ChurchSuite's online giving platform. You can easily make Donate available to new and existing givers through your website, at your information desk (via Connect), embed Donate links within communications, and share a Donate link on social media channels. Those with My ChurchSuite access can also access Donate from their My Giving section.
Apps ChurchSuite and My ChurchSuite can be accessed through any web browser and also using the free iOS and Android ChurchSuite app, available from the respective app stores. Apps are fully functional - they're not scaled-down versions of the browser-based system. App users can have their admin-facing ChurchSuite and member-facing My ChurchSuite accounts within one app and easily switch between the two accounts. A separate Connect app is available for Android devices only - ideal for those wishing to run a wireless Child Check-In system and for use by Welcome teams at a church information point.
Our secure Developer API is freely available to customer churches who wish to develop their own application using the data in certain ChurchSuite modules. Our Developer API is available to "full suite" customers only - those subscribing to all ChurchSuite modules. We also provide an open JSON for developers who only wish to 'read' data from your ChurchSuite account.
Other terms you'll come across...
Contact refers to an adult person in the Address Book module.
Child refers to a child or young person in the Children module.
Your Address Book and Children module are repositories for all people of interest, regardless of their level of engagement in your church. Details of members, congregants, those who have connected with you and those on the periphery of your church community can all be held and categorised in these two modules. Contacts and children are sometimes referred to collectively as you members - for example, in the context of the member-facing My ChurchSuite. Our use of the term 'member' is not intended to mean 'official membership', although you can easily categorise those in the Address Book and Children module you consider official members, including Electoral Roll members, using Tags.
Giver refers to a person who has a giver profile in the Giving module. Givers can be linked through to their underlying Address Book contact profile (meaning you only need to record contact details in the Address Book) or you can maintain them as unlinked givers (perhaps those donors who are outside your church, or those just visiting) and optionally record their contact details against the unlinked giver's profile. In this way, giver profiles can be kept distinct and confidential by restricting access to the Giving module.
User refers to a person who has been granted selective module access to your admin-facing system. By contrast, Administrator users have full access to all modules. The system includes the ability to group users into User Groups. One use of this feature is the ability to restrict the visibility of certain features to user groups - only users who are part of the group will be able to see or use that feature.
Small groups typically refer to your church's mid-week discipleship groups and they are managed in the Small Groups module (all ChurchSuite modules can be renamed to suit your internal terminology). You might call them life groups, connect/community groups, hubs, pastorates, cell/growth groups, and house/home groups. These groups will likely meet with various frequencies on various dates and in various venues. The group focus may be anything from intentional discipleship to outreach to a fun focus. You may (or may not) record attendance for these groups. Roles can be optionally assigned to group members, such as "Leader" or "Host". Both adult contacts and children can be assigned to these groups.
Children groups refer to the children and youth groups that your church runs, typically at your weekend services, but may also include your mid-week children and youth groups, and children groups like "mums and toddlers". These groups exist in the Children module (not the Small Groups module). You can record attendance for children groups (either by producing printed registers for manual check-in/out or by using the module's Child Check-in system). Children are usually assigned to these groups based on their age and will normally be processed through your various children groups as they get older or in line with a change of school year. Children groups provide a means for managing your regular children and visiting families/children using the check-in system.
Tags are a simple way to create custom groupings of people in your database that don't naturally fit into the designated "groups" functionality found elsewhere in the Small Groups and Children modules, as described above. For example, you could create a Tag to custom-group together all your "Member" contacts, all your givers who gave to the last stewardship campaign, or all the children who went to summer camp. Once tagged, it's then really easy to bulk-communicate with those people. Tags can also be used to filter ChurchSuite to see the results for just a particular subset of your database. Within ChurchSuite there are two types of tags - fixed tags and smart tags.
Key Dates are a feature of the Address Book and Children modules, ideal for recording significant date-related milestones, anniversaries and date events against people. These key dates might typically represent people's journeys and engagement with your church activities e.g. the date someone first connects with your church, the date they attend a significant event or course, and the date they complete some training. In addition to the key dates your users can add against people, ChurchSuite also adds certain Key Dates, such as when a person joins or leaves a serving ministry or small group. Using Key Dates, it's very easy to visualise and report on people's engagement with the life and activity of your community.
Flows are a feature of the Address Book module and enable churches to easily track and manage people through your recurring admin tasks, for example, newcomer integration. Using Flows allows you to keep track of who is at what stage of your processes, the tasks that are due/overdue and what needs to happen with them next. Users can receive reminder notifications when tasks become due, making it easy to care for people consistently, without people falling through the cracks in your processes. Flows can be used for a wide variety of processes and workflows, e.g. DBS/safeguarding checks, managing discipleship applications, recruitment and training, membership processes, and helping people get into small groups - to name but a few.
Ministries exist within the Rotas module and refer to your various areas of serving and volunteering in your church, including Sunday ministries and mid-week ministries. Overseers can be assigned to ministries. Ministries can be organised into teams, with roles optionally assigned to ministry members too. And of course, rotas can be produced for each ministry, with automatic, timely serving reminders sent to rota members.
Getting started...
- Review each module's settings:
Beginning with the Address Book, and working through each module in turn, you may find it helpful to head into the module options via the cogwheel icon in the top right-hand corner. There you can further customise certain aspects of ChurchSuite to best suit your needs - perhaps enabling or disabling features, adding custom fields or enabling optional fields. If you're a multi-site customer you'll need to add each of the sites. - Import your data:
If you were working with test data during your trial, you may want to clear down that data and import clean data. This support article explains how to import your data. This support article explains how to delete existing contacts. You should set up any custom fields you wish to use before importing. We recommend you import adults and children separately into the respective Address Book and Children modules and then complete the spouse/partner and parent/child linking after import. Multi-site customers can either specify the site in their data to be imported or you can import people into each site, one site at a time. - Data cleansing, linking couples and children:
Each module's reports section includes several data-cleansing tools to help you identify potential duplicates and missing data. Linking children to parents. - Set up your organisation's profile settings:
Upload your organisation's branding and artwork, e.g. logos, colour schemes etc. See this support article for further information. Check your account, billing and data protection contact details are up to date. Check that your ChurchSuite subscription payment has been set up. - Create users:
Add users to your ChurchSuite account giving appropriate permissions to each. See this support article - there's no maximum number of users. Set up any User Groups and add users to those groups. See support article. - Complete any optional third-party ChurchSuite integrations:
E.g. Stripe (for receiving card payments for event ticket payments and donations), GoCardless (for direct debit donations), Podcast, SMS integrations and permissions (e.g. TextLocal, Twilio, BulkSMS). - Rename your modules to suit your organisation's terminology:
You can change the default module names to use language that is familiar to your organisation. So if you call small groups "Cell Groups", here's how. - Set up your children's groups:
Set up your group structure - what we call a "gathering" and the various groups in each gathering; then assign children to their groups. Gatherings, Groups and Sessions, Add children to groups. - Set up your small groups:
Including roles, clusters, visibility in My ChurchSuite and Embed, plus group sign-up settings. Add people to your small groups. - Set up your Attendance module: attendance categories
- Set up your Calendar module: calendar event categories. You can then begin to add events to your calendar.
- Set up your Rotas module: Set up your ministries and publish serving team rotas
Assign people to ministries, add people to teams, and publish rotas. - Set up Preset communications: emails or SMSs.
- Explore Tags and Key Dates: Set up any Fixed tags, Smart tags, Flows and Key Dates your organisation may want to begin with.
- Set up the member-facing My ChurchSuite: My ChurchSuite
- Set up the Giving module:
Funds, online giving (optional), giver profiles, Gift Aid settings (the UK only), Gift Aid declarations (the UK only), and pledges. - Set up the Bookings module: Set up your various booking Types and your Resources.
Note: For each support article referenced above, we also draw your attention to the related articles shown at the bottom of each article - these provide further detail about related functionality and similar related topics. Help is always available through the "Support" beacon in the bottom right-hand corner of every page in ChurchSuite - search by topic, phrase or keyword.
Data Protection
We encourage all organisations to revisit their Data Protection policies and procedures in light of the features and functionality they'll use within ChurchSuite. Questions you might consider include:
- Do people know what personal information is being stored/processed by our organisation and the purposes for which it is used? For each type of information we process, do we have a lawful basis for processing and is our privacy notice up to date?
- Do people understand that only appropriate users have access to our data, the security protections in place and their permissions?
- Does our data retention policy need updating? Have we purged any data that we no longer need or no longer have a lawful basis to process?
- Do we need to refresh our training, confidentiality and data access provisions for our staff and other users?
- Are the default privacy settings and communication options appropriate and in line with guiding legislation and the expectations and wishes of our members?
- Do the organisation's "data capture" processes (e.g. visitor cards, web-embedded forms etc) have sufficient data protection messaging and privacy notice visibility?
- Does our safeguarding policy need updating to reflect how data will be handled in respect of children, young people and vulnerable adults?