Getting started with the Children module

Purpose of the module

Welcome to the ChurchSuite Children module! This module is for managing all the children and young people contacts associated with your church, ministry or charitable organisation - typically under 18s. Through the Children module, you can record and track levels of engagement, manage common admin workflows, and communicate and report with ease.

We encourage you to read this article in full to familiarise yourself with the module's key features and customisation options available and to acquaint yourself with some of the basic concepts and terminology you'll see within the module and our other Children module support articles.

Children module features at a glance

• Add or import new or existing children and young people
• Child profile pages with everything in one view
• Link children to their adult parents/carers in the Address Book (a linked child), or, for those whose parents/carers are not in the Address Book, parent/carer details can be maintained against the child (an unlinked child)
• Use the module's standard fields, enable optional fields, or add custom fields
• Manage each child's communication options, privacy settings and ongoing consent
• Categorize children and young people using Tags
• Maintain historical records of key dates and milestones for each child
• Record internal-only notes against children and young people
• Build custom forms
• Use Flows to process people through your common admin workflows and receive reminders when tasks become due and overdue
• Communicate by Email and SMS - choosing whether to communicate with parents/carers or children (sending in real-time or scheduling communications) or produce address labels
• Wide range of standard reports, or perform custom reporting using Smart Tags or the Table Generator
• Perform batch updates of information to multiple children
• Archive children and young people that have moved on from your community, or set them active again if they return
• Functionality designed with GDPR best compliance and safeguarding best practices in mind
• Stay on top of birthdays, medical and additional needs, doctor and school details
• Create age-based groups for each of your gatherings, assign children to groups and process them into other groups as they get older
• Produce printed registers and badges for manual attendance recording, or use the Child Check-In system to register children (and team) and check them in and out of groups quickly and safely
• Wide range of attendance reports to help manage your children's ministry
• 'Change logs' to help you stay on top of all the changes being made by your User or parents/carers
• Invite primary parents/carers to access the My ChurchSuite member-facing platform - enabling them to keep their children's and their details up to date
• Invite children over the Age of Consent to access the 'My ChurchSuite' member-facing platform
• Multi-site support - assign each child to a site, perhaps where a "site" represents your different communities, projects or locations (e.g. different worshipping locations for church services, or different projects for a charity)
• Multi-lingual support using in-built translations for many countries or using your browser's regional settings translation
• Accessible through any browser or via the free iOS or Android "ChurchSuite" app

Next steps...

To explore many of the Children module's features and functionality, you'll need to add or import some data. It's easy to do, or the ChurchSuite Support team can import your data. See the related support articles at the end of this article for further details.

Got a question?

You’ll find the answers to most questions in our support articles - they're all available through the Support beacon located in the bottom-right corner of each page in the Children module - just 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 get in touch with one of the ChurchSuite team - we’re happy to help!