Getting started with the Children module

Introduction to the Children module

Welcome to the Children module. This module is for managing all the children and young people associated with your church, ministry, or charitable organisation—typically, those under 18. Through the Children module, you can manage children's details, record and track engagement, manage common admin workflows, communicate, and produce reports.

We encourage you to read this article in full to familiarise yourself with the module's key features and customisation options, as well as some of the basic concepts and terminology you'll encounter in it, and in our related support articles and training videos.

Children module features at a glance

• Simple workflows to add new children and parents/carers or import your existing contact data.
• Child profile pages with everything you need to see in one view.
• A wide range of standard and optional fields, or add your own custom fields to store information of interest.
• Manage each child's communication options, privacy settings and consent.
• Categorise children and young people using tags.
• Maintain details of each child's key dates.
• Easily add internal-only notes.
• Create custom forms and collect responses.
• Use Flows to manage people through common administrative processes and receive timely reminders when they become due or overdue.
• Communicate by Email and SMS, sending messages in real-time or scheduling communications to be sent later.
• Choose from a wide range of standard and custom reporting options.
• Make use of intuitive bulk action to perform updates of information for multiple children.
• Benefit from functionality that's designed with privacy, GDPR best compliance and safeguarding best practices in mind.
• Stay on top of those important details: birthdays, medical and additional needs, and doctor and school details.
• Manage each of your age-based groups and group member lists and easily process children into new groups as they grow older.
• Produce printed registers and badges for manual attendance recording or use the fantastic Check-In system to register children, visitors and team members, check them in and out of groups and record attendance automatically.
• A wide range of attendance reports giving useful insights into your children's ministry.
• Send invitations to primary parents/carers and older children to access the member-facing My ChurchSuite, enabling them to keep their details up to date. Through My ChurchSuite, people can manage all their serving requests, block out serving unavailability, organise swaps, view the church event calendar, sign up for events and courses, join small groups, and much more!
• Multi-site functionality: Children can be assigned to one or more sites that represent their distinct worshipping community, campus, or location.

Next Steps

Terminology

Here's a list of key terms you'll encounter in the Children module and the related support articles and training videos for this module:

• While the terms 'people' and 'person' are used generically across your ChurchSuite modules, the Children module is the core repository for Children, young people and their Parent/Carer connections. This may include people with varying levels of engagement with your church or charity whose personal details you are permitted to store.
• The Children module has a fantastic Check-In System designed to check your regular and any visiting children in and out of groups and record group attendance.
• A Group Setup is the container for one or more age-based Groups. Typically, a Group Setup is created for the children/youth programme that runs at weekend services, but you might add other Setups for other occasions or events, like a mid-week Youth Club or Parents & Toddlers.
• Flows are an incredibly versatile tool designed to streamline repetitive "people-processing" tasks by breaking them down into manageable stages. For each stage, you define the choice of preset actions to be processed as each person becomes due. Actions can be processed manually by a module User or set to run automatically when people become due or overdue in a flow stage. Designated flow managers can receive timely reminder emails about flow progress and notifications when people are due or overdue. Flows are the perfect alternative to unwieldy spreadsheets, ensuring no one falls through the cracks in a busy office.
• Key Dates Everyone has important dates and milestones resulting from their interactions with your church or organisation. Some key dates are recorded for statistical or historic reporting; others mark anniversaries of important occasions in someone's journey with you. You may want to maintain records of dates of certain discipleship milestones, such as participation in key events, baptism, confirmation, the completion of a course, or administrative milestones, such as membership or training.
• My ChurchSuite is your church's member-facing platform. It allows invited parents/carers and older children to update their details, view all their communications in one place, and communicate with one another.
• Tags are a common feature in databases, enabling you to create custom groupings of people in a module. While other modules will already group people in their ministries, small groups or age-based groups, for all other people-grouping needs, tags are a must! Tags make it possible to communicate with or report on specific groupings of people. In ChurchSuite, you'll experience two types of tags - fixed tags and smart tags.

Got a question?

You'll find the answers to most questions in our support articles - they're all available through the Support menu located in the top-right corner of each page in ChurchSuite. Select Get help and search by topic, phrase or keyword. You can also access the Support Article library on our website. And if you still can't find something you're looking for, click to contact one of the ChurchSuite team - we're happy to help!