Case Study: Managing your Electoral Roll

About the author

Paul and his wife Fiona used to lead the Vineyard church in Bournemouth, UK, where they introduced ChurchSuite and My ChurchSuite to the church. Paul now heads up customer support and training at ChurchSuite.

In this article, Paul uses insights from Church of England customers and from his own time serving on PCCs to show how ChurchSuite features are used to create and manage a church Electoral Roll.

Introduction

The Parochial Church Council (PCC) of each Church of England parish church is responsible for maintaining an Electoral Roll of lay members entitled to participate in the Annual Parochial Church Meeting (APCM). The Roll is prepared afresh every six years and should be revised annually. To help, ChurchSuite has several features to help you create and manage an Electoral Roll. This article focuses on an adult Electoral Roll in the Address Book but, since those aged 16 and over are eligible to join, you can easily mirror these Address Book workflows in the Children module.

Collecting Electoral Roll registrations

As an alternative to a paper-based registration system, you can easily create a form in ChurchSuite to collect and manage responses. Forms have the distinct advantage of collecting personal details in a GDPR-compliant manner, with prospective Roll members enjoying a simple, clear and intuitive user experience. Once created, you can make your Electoral Roll form available on your website and share links to the form in your communications and on social media channels. See the related support articles - Creating forms and Managing form responses - for further information.

To help you get started, we've created an example form that you can install and further customise. This form complies with the requirements set out in the current Church Representation Rules and broadly follows the layout of the Church of England template. However, we encourage you to check that your finished ChurchSuite form is acceptable to your Diocese before publishing it and collecting responses.

From the Forms section of the Address Book (or Children module), select the latest Electoral Roll Example:

You can optionally define form Actions that add respondents to an "Electoral Roll" tag and add a "Joined Electoral Roll" key date. In the following example, I've set those two actions to Run Manually. As you review each response received, you'll link it to the respondent's contact profile (or add a new person from the response) and then choose Run Actions to assign the Electoral Roll tag and add the key date. Take a look at the related support article for more information on Form actions.

Whichever method you use to collect Roll registrations - through a ChurchSuite form or a paper-based form - the remainder of this article explores how to manage the Electoral Roll in the Address Book and Children module.

Setting up an Electoral Roll in ChurchSuite

Step 1 - Add a fixed tag

You can manage the list of people on the Electoral Roll with a simple Fixed Tag. In this workflow, you add people to the Tag when they join the Roll and remove them if they leave and when a new Roll needs to be started. See the related support article for more information about Fixed Tags.

Working within the Tags section of the module, click Add tag and complete the tag settings, like this example:

Step 2 - Tag people when they request to join the roll

If you're using a ChurchSuite form to collect Electoral Roll registrations and have followed the "Form Actions" suggestion in the earlier section, new roll members will be tagged as part of the Run actions workflow when managing their form response.

Alternatively, you can as easily assign people to the Electoral Roll tag by clicking Add contacts on the tag View. Note that this tag view is also the place to Communicate with Electoral Roll members, for example, to send an email inviting them to the upcoming APCM.

Alternatively, you can also add (and remove) tags directly from a person's profile page - click Add to tag to search and select the Electoral Roll tag to assign:

Step 3 - Assign a key date

The ChurchSuite Key Dates functionality is designed to help you track people's significant milestones over time as they interact with your church and ministries. Electoral Roll membership - the date people join or leave the Roll - are two such milestones worthy of tracking and, in doing so, it opens up helpful Key Date reporting opportunities.

If you're using a ChurchSuite form to collect Electoral Roll registrations and have followed the "Form Actions" suggestion in the earlier section, new roll members will be assigned a key date as part of the Run actions workflow when managing their form response.

Alternatively, you can add a key date from a person's profile page by clicking Add key date on the Key Dates tab:

Key Dates will be helpful if you need to produce periodic reports of who has joined and left the Electoral Roll within a range of dates, such as for the Annual Parish Return. You can filter the "Joined/Left Electoral Roll" Key Date View to see details of just those within a key Date range reflecting your Parish Return period. The results include Active and Archived people but you can filter further by Status using the Advanced Search:

Starting a new Electoral Roll

The Church Representation Rules mandate that the Electoral Roll is reset every six years and a new Roll taken. While the earlier sections describe ongoing revisions to manage an existing Roll, this section outlines a suggested workflow for resetting the Roll.

Step 1 - Assign a key date

As mentioned previously, you may find it helpful to record a "Left/Reset Electoral Roll" key date. From the Contacts section of the module, filter the list for your existing Electoral Roll tag:

You can now use the Actions to bulk-assign a key date for "Left/Reset Electoral Roll" - select Add to key date:

Your Contacts list is paginated, so you'll need to repeat this bulk action one page at a time. You can reduce the number of pages by increasing the pagination size. The maximum pagination is 250 records per page. Bulk actions take time to process, especially for long pages, so please be patient and let the process complete before navigating away from the page.

Before resetting the Electoral Roll tag, you may wish to use it to Communicate with the outgoing Roll members - perhaps to thank them for participating and invite them to consider joining the new Roll. You could even include a link to your new Electoral Roll Registration form!

Step 2 - Clearing down the Electoral Roll tag

When you are ready, you can clear down the current Electoral Roll tag using the Remove bulk action (contacts are only removed from the tag; contact profiles are not deleted) and Edit and rename the tag to reflect the new Roll revision year.

Recording member attendance at the APCM

Step 1 - Publicising your event

With your Annual Parochial Church Meeting added as an event in the Calendar module, you can optionally use the event sign-up functionality to encourage Electoral Members to let you know they're planning to attend. In the example below, the event visibility in My ChurchSuite is restricted to just those in the Electoral Roll tag - only those on the Roll will see the event in My ChurchSuite and sign-up is only available through My ChurchSuite (by those in the Electoral Roll tag) and anyone else to whom the event page link has been shared. The Send invite workflow is a great way to publicise your event to those on the Electoral Roll, giving recipients a neat Accept/Decline user experience while allowing you to keep track of invitation responses and to follow up with acceptees and declines after the event. See the related support article for further information about Event invitations and Event visibility.

Step 2 - Recording attendance

The Event check-in functionality makes it easy to record a register of attendance at the APCM. While the Annual Parish Return only requires a total number of attendees present, your APCM minutes may need a list of names of those present at the meeting - ideal if you want to follow up with those who couldn't attend for any reason.

From the APCM event in your Calendar module, select Go to event check-in.

The Check-in page shows event sign-ups by default. Use the Settings to disable "Show checked in" so the list gets shorter as people are checked in, or to disable the Confirm check-ins pop-up. If you've not used the event sign-up functionality for the APCM, you can still use the check-in page to record an impromptu register of those in attendance by selecting the Search [the entire] Address Book setting or select Search event tags to filter just those in the Electoral Roll tag that the event visibility is restricted to.

The list of matching names filters as you type in the Search. The counter at the top of the check-in page gives you the total number in attendance:

The attendance data is recorded back in ChurchSuite on the Check-Ins tab for the event. After the event, you may wish to bulk-assign an "Attended APCM" key date to all those in attendance - click Add to key date:

Printing the Electoral Roll

The Church Representation Rules require that a copy of the Electoral Roll be published and available for inspection. However, following the 2019 revision and the introduction of the GDPR, the published roll should now be a list of names only and any personally identifiable data, such as roll member addresses, should no longer be published.

From the Contacts section of the module, use the Advanced Search to filter for those in the Electoral Roll tag:

Click Download CSV and choose the fields of data to be included in the report. Scroll down and click Download to save the Roll CSV file to your device, ready for printing.

How are you managing your Electoral Roll?

Let us know your top tips and we'll look to incorporate them into this case study. Email support@churchsuite.com