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 under 18. Through the Children module, you can record and track levels of engagement, manage common admin workflows, communicate, and report easily.

We encourage you to read this article in full to familiarise yourself with the module's key features and customisation options and to acquaint yourself with some of the basic concepts and terminology you'll see in the module and our related 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 parent/carer) or, for those whose parents/carers are not in the Address Book, parent/carer details can be maintained against the child (an unlinked parent/carer).
• Use the module's standard fields, enable optional fields or add custom fields.
• Manage each child's communication options, privacy settings and ongoing consent.
• Categorise 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 children through your common admin workflows and receive reminders when tasks become due and overdue.
• Communicate by Email and SMS—choose 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 who 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, and doctor and school details.
• Add your age-based groups, assign children to their groups, and easily process them into other groups as they grow older.
• Produce printed registers and badges for manual attendance recording or use the Check-In system to register children, visitors and team members, check them in and out of groups and record attendance automatically.
• 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 Users or parents/carers.
• Invite primary parents/carers to access the My ChurchSuite member-facing platform, enabling them to keep their children 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)

Next Steps

Terminology

Here's a list of terms you may see across the ChurchSuite modules and in our support articles:

• The Check-In System is designed to check children in and out of groups and automatically record attendance at your various in-person events and services.
• A Group Setup is the container for a series of age-based Groups. Typically, a Group Setup is created for your children/youth programme that runs at weekend services, but you will add a Group Setup for each environment in which you run a different configuration of age-based groups, e.g. mid-week Youth Club or Parents & Toddlers. When starting a Check-In session, you will be asked to select the Group Setup you wish to use.
• Key Dates are a feature of the Address Book and Children modules, ideal for recording significant date-related milestones, anniversaries and date events against people. These key dates might typically represent people's journeys and engagement with your church activities, e.g. the date someone first connects with your church, the date they attend a significant event or course and the date they complete some training. Using Key Dates, you can quickly visualise and report on people's engagement with the life and activity of your community.
• Parent/carer is a generic term we use to refer to a child's legal parent, carer or a person with parental responsibility. Parents/carers can be contacts in the Address Book, linked to their children, or their details can be maintained against the child as a "Not in the Address Book" parent/carer.
• Tags are a simple way to create custom groupings of categorise people around something they share in common. You'll use Tags in a large Address Book or Children module to help with targeted communications and to filter reports to see results for just those children of interest in selected tags. There are two types of tags: Smart Tags and Fixed Tags.
• Visitors are the guest child profiles created when they check in using the Check-In system. You can easily convert a visitor profile into a full child profile.

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!