Notes and note visibility

Overview of notes

Notes are a useful way of recording appropriate information about a person. Notes can also be added against events, small groups, ministries, bookings, plans and organisations. Notes only show within the module in which they were added and are never visible or accessible outside of ChurchSuite in the member-facing My ChurchSuite. In this regard, notes are a feature of your admin-facing ChurchSuite modules and are only visible to users, not members.

By default, Notes are visible to All Users who have permission for the module and site to which the note has been added. However, it is possible to restrict note visibility, either to a specific 'group' of users or to make the note private and only visible to the author. Notes are date and time stamped and clearly show who recorded or last edited the note.

To view notes on a contact's profile page, navigate to the Notes tab. 

From a person's notes view page - or when viewing an event, ministry, small group, booking, plan or organisation - you can add a note with the Add note option.

Before saving a note, you can optionally restrict who the note is Visible to - either the default All Users (i.e. all Users with access to the module) or a more private, Just Me. It's also possible to restrict visibility to one or more User Groups (see the related support article for information about User Groups). Click Save to add the note.

You can view notes with a widget on a contact's Details page. Using the Customise option in the widgets, select notes, then save, and the notes widget will appear on the details page. 

You can Pin important notes. Pinned notes remain at the top of the list so that they're more readily seen. You can Unpin a note when it is no longer important; the unpinned note returns to the date order of other notes. Pinned notes also appear at the top of the notes widget. 

Each module that supports Notes functionality includes a Notes index page, accessed via the More options - select View notes:

The index can be filtered by Created, Pinned, Created by, Visible To and Tag.

To view the Notes index page filtered for a particular person, event, booking, plan or organisation, select the View all action from the top of the Notes tab in the relevant profile page:

From this filtered list, note the Bulk actions available to Download CSV, Edit and Delete the notes.

Public notes

By default, Notes are Visible to All Users. A Note is always linked to the User who authored it, so everyone knows who wrote it. But what does 'All Users' mean? It simply means every other User with permission for the module in which the note was added. Notes are never visible outside of that module and never visible to members in My ChurchSuite.

All User notes are useful when communicating or dealing with people, enabling teams to work more collaboratively and stay on the same page pastorally, rather than sending inconsistent messages without knowing the full picture. Using the Notes index, accessed via the More options, in relevant modules:

Here, you can view all notes for that module - ideal for catching up on what's been happening after a period of absence or leave. You'll only see notes that you're permitted to see!

Private notes

Private notes can only be seen by the user who wrote them. In other words, if a leader in your organisation adds a private note against an individual in the Address Book, no other leaders (indeed no other User or Administrator) will be able to see it, and they will not even know the note has been made.

Private "Just me" notes are entirely confidential and also helpful when the note serves only as a personal reminder that will be of no interest to other users. To make a note private, change the Visible to option to your contact. 

Restricting the visibility of notes to user groups

In addition to private and public notes, you can also restrict visibility to one or more groups of users - User Groups - so that only a user group member can view, edit, delete or pin the note. For example, you might have a "Pastoral Bereavement Team" User Group - comprising all the Users who belong to that team - who add potentially sensitive notes that need to be visible to other members of that pastoral user group but not visible to anyone else. While a private note is visible to a single member (Just me), a restricted note is visible to a group of multiple users. If the user group member list changes over time, only active user group members can see restricted content.

When adding notes, a user will only see User Groups they belong to in the Visible to drop-down list, plus any User Groups that are set visible to all users but that they may not belong to. For example, you could have a "Safeguarding" user group that is visible to all users so that any user can add a restricted Note visible to that user group. While any user can add the restricted note, they are prevented from viewing other restricted notes for that user group, including the note they have just added - only "Safeguarding" user group members can view restricted notes. See the related article on Restricting visibility and access with user groups.

Markdown support in notes

More advanced web users may already be familiar with Markdown notation, which is a text-to-HTML conversion language that allows you to type using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format and see it converted into structurally valid HTML. ChurchSuite supports the CommonMark format of Markdown.

Notes throughout ChurchSuite support Markdown notation, enabling you to add customised formatting to your otherwise plain text notes. Here's an example:

In this example, the emboldened blue note title, the emboldened "more info" and the unordered bullet list are all entered in Markdown notation. Here's what the original Markdown notation looks like:

Using the special characters of Markdown notation, you can therefore enhance your notes if you wish. Markdown notation allows the following customised content to be added to your Notes:

• Headings
• Block quotes
• Bold, italics
• Lists - unordered (bullets) ordered (numbered) and nested (indented)

A full list of CommonMark Markdown notations can be found here. Markdown support only extends to the Notes functionality outlined in this article and not all CommonMark is supported by ChurchSuite. Rota notes and Service notes are "plain text" fields that store data differently and therefore do not support markdown.