Considerations when managing a death or bereavement

Introduction

A death is a painful experience for a church, for its leaders and congregation and for bereaved family members. Alongside the pastoral care offered to the deceased's family, you should also consider what happens to the deceased's personal data and the impact that changes may have on bereaved family members whose details are linked to the deceased. For example, grieving parents/carers, following the loss of a child, or a grieving spouse, following the loss of their partner, may each have preferences about what to do with their deceased family member's information and when those changes are made.

It may be helpful to imagine a parent, carer, or spouse who used to see their linked child or partner's details in My ChurchSuite, but now suddenly cannot see that person because they've been unlinked and archived, or deleted without warning. Similarly, if you don't make certain changes in a timely manner, an unsuspecting User could send a seemingly thoughtless communication to the deceased's email address or to a surviving family member.

Changes to a deceased person's data should be handled sensitively, appropriately, promptly, and importantly, in accordance with the expressed or reasonably known wishes of the surviving family members, as part of your early pastoral care. Bereaved family members may not yet have thought about this, so this is an opportunity to demonstrate sensitivity to their feelings at a difficult time.

In this article, we'll explore the considerations that you may wish to raise with bereaved family members in early pastoral conversations, with changes made to personal data intended to help them, the wider church family and its leaders. The aim should be to agree together on what will happen and when, and to explain the impact of the changes. If you are a church administrator or pastoral carer, we encourage you to familiarise yourself with the full contents of this article so that you and your team can factor changes in ChurchSuite into your pastoral and administrative processes in the event of a death.

1. Consider how other Users will know of a death or bereavement

In addition to timely internal communication with pastoral and admin team members, it may be helpful to also add a sensitively worded note to the profiles of both the deceased and bereaved family members, perhaps pinning the note so that it persists at the top of a list of notes on their profiles.

When appropriate, and preferably with the bereaved family's awareness, you should archive the deceased's profile at the earliest opportunity.

Archiving the deceased contact or child profile will:

• Keep them linked to their spouse/partner in the Address Book, and to children in the Children module. Bereaved family members with My ChurchSuite access will continue to see their family link to the deceased until changes are made to the bereaved family member's marital status and parental relationships (see later).
• Disable their My ChurchSuite access to prevent further access, log them out on all devices, and reset their privacy settings so they are no longer visible to others in My ChurchSuite.
• Make no changes to communication options, but once archived, they will no longer be included in a recipient list when sending communications through ChurchSuite. Note: they will still receive pre-scheduled communications that were sent before they were archived.
• Remove them from all groups (Small Groups and Children modules), ministries and rotas (Rotas module), and flows (Address Book and Children modules). They will no longer receive rota reminders.
• Remove them as overseers for all ministries (Rotas module), events (Calendar module) and clusters (Small Groups module). They will no longer receive overseer notifications.
• Prevent them from showing in the filtered search results and reports, except where archived people are intentionally filtered.
• Prevent them from showing in search results in the Check-In system.
• Unlink their contact profile from their giver profile (Giving module) and any customer profile they may have (Bookings module). The unlinked "Not in the Address Book" giver and customer profiles remain active and must be archived separately; otherwise, they will continue to receive communications sent through those modules.
• Preserve their tags, key dates and notes on their profile, but an archived contact will no longer be shown when viewing a tag - tags only show people with an "Active" status.

2. Consider rotas and groups the deceased belonged to

While archiving the deceased will remove the groups, ministries and rotas in ChurchSuite, consider an appropriate notification to the ministry overseers and group leaders to let them know about a death to prevent inadvertent rota or group-related communications sent via other channels outside of ChurchSuite, like WhatsApp groups. This step is especially important if the deceased's profile isn't being archived immediately.

3. Consider changes to relationship status

Before making changes to the deceased or bereaved family member's marital status or unlinking spouses/partners in ChurchSuite, you may wish to consider the implications and discuss these with the bereaved family members. A person's marital status can be seen in My ChurchSuite, along with the name of an active or archived person their marital status links to them. This means a bereaved family member with a "Married" status would continue to see their linked spouse/partner name, even if archived. After the loss of a partner, a surviving spouse/partner may very much still feel married and not yet ready to be labelled as widowed or single, or to have their married marital status removed entirely.

In agreement with a bereaved spouse or partner, there will be an appropriate time to change their marital status in ChurchSuite. You can leave the status as "Married" and manually unlink their spouse, or choose from one of the other marital status options - "Widowed", "Single" or "Unspecified" - which will automatically unlink them. Make marital status and linking changes on the bereaved spouse/partner profile, and the unlinking will also be applied to the deceased. Once unlinked, the deceased will no longer show in My ChurchSuite when the bereaved spouse/partner views their profile.

Note: If an address is maintained for both partners, the "People" widget on family member profiles in the Address Book and Children module will continue to show the deceased as "At this Address", even if their profile has been archived. This is only seen by module Users. However, if this is not desirable, you can remove the address from the deceased's profile and the deceased will no longer be shown in the "People" widget of family member profiles in ChurchSuite.

4. Consider changes affecting children

A child with My ChurchSuite access can see a list of their parents and carers in their My Details section. If the deceased is a parent or carer, and in consultation with the bereaved family members, review the parent/carer records for each child family member in the Children module. Remember, a child may have other parental or carer relationships with wider family members such as grandparents, aunts and uncles.

Mindful that the loss of a parent is especially painful for a child, carefully consider the appropriate time to make changes that will remove a deceased parent/carer from showing to a child. When making changes, you can remove a deceased parent/carer record, but you can also ensure the child remains linked to surviving parent and carers. Review each child's profile to ensure there are no unexpected contact details for the deceased, so that future parent/carer communications sent through the Children module are not inadvertently sent to the deceased's email address or mobile. Look out for any instance of a "Not in Address Book" parent/carer record for the deceased, and remove them. Finally, remember that only a parent/carer designated as "Primary" can manage their child's details through My ChurchSuite.

Finally, in this section, the death of a child is also especially difficult. Parents and carers with My ChurchSuite access see details of linked children in their My Children section, and those who are designated as "Primary" parents or carers are able to manage the details of linked children. Seeing a deceased child's details shown in "My Children" could be a comforting or painful experience following a bereavement. With this in mind, and in discussion with bereaved family members, follow the considerations outlined in the first section of this article to archive the deceased child's profile at the earliest appropriate opportunity. Once a deceased child has been unlinked from their parents/carers (or archived), they will no longer show in the My Children section.

Note: You can hide the My Children section entirely for bereaved parents with no other children — here's how. Navigate to the "My ChurchSuite" options in the Children module's settings and note the setting titled "Adding Children". While this setting primarily controls who can add new children through My ChurchSuite, it also determines whether a "My Children" section is shown to adult contacts with My ChurchSuite access. By choosing "Allow existing parents/carers to add additional children", a bereaved family member would only see the My Children section if they have additional surviving children.

5. Consider scaling back personal data held

Archiving is also an opportunity to consider scaling back the data you currently store in ChurchSuite, but also in other systems, including paper-based systems. This is often referred to in Data Protection (including the GDPR) as data minimisation. Retain only what is necessary, perhaps for a season, and only where the data continues to serve a useful purpose. You should also consider your church's data retention policy, which may require you to retain certain data for an ongoing lawful purpose. For example, you may be required to maintain some personal and attendance data for safeguarding recordkeeping purposes, or giver profile data for HMRC or financial audit trail purposes.

Consider removing email addresses, and telephone and mobile numbers. This will ensure other Users do not inadvertently use those details in the future. Similarly, as mentioned earlier, removing the deceased's address will prevent an archived person from showing "At this address" in the "People" widget on profiles in the Address Book and Children module. You may also wish to remove notes and key dates (see related articles at the bottom of the page) that no longer serve a useful purpose in ministry or the church's admin processes.

Finally, in this section, here are some further considerations related to data you may hold in ChurchSuite for the deceased:

• Check the deceased's profile for sign-ups to future events that may have been submitted before their death. You can cancel those sign-ups.
• Review the deceased giver profile in the Giving module, looking for active pledges that need to be cancelled and Gift Aid declarations that need to be ended. Consider adding a note against the deceased's giver profile so that your finance team are aware of the death of a giver. As mentioned above, archiving the deceased's profile in the Address Book will unlink the giver profile, but it remains active until it is archived separately.
• If the deceased had User access to your ChurchSuite modules, we recommend that you archive their User account to prevent unauthorised login attempts. Archiving a User profile will preserve historic leave setups and leave request data, which you may be required to retain for reporting purposes. Note also that the deceased User may have content in your ChurchSuite account that was restricted to their User account only (i.e. visible to "Just me"). This restricted-visibility data will not be visible to other Users, but you can retain access by reassigning that deceased User's profile to another email address, requesting a password reset email, which will enable you to maintain access to the restricted content via their login, or to change or remove the visibility restrictions.

6. Consider how you will mark the date of death and anniversaries

You may find it helpful to add a "Deceased" key date to the deceased's profile, indicating the date of death. Key dates are retained when a profile is archived, and they are useful for key date reporting purposes, perhaps where you want to identify the number of deaths each year.

You may also wish to add a sensitively named "Bereavement" key date against bereaved family members in your Address Book and Children module, perhaps adding the deceased's name and relationship in the key date description.

Bereavement key dates can be used to identify anniversaries of a death. You may also consider running a 'Bereavement follow-up' flow, adding surviving family members to the flow and maintaining the next 'due date' for the next anniversary of a death, or to mark another significant date, like the deceased's first birthday after their death. When bereaved family members become due, timely flow reminders can prompt a timely pastoral phone call or to send a card or message to the bereaved family members. These key dates can also be used to identify family members that you'd like to invite to any memorial occasions that your church holds.