Getting started with the Address Book

Introduction to the Address Book

Welcome to the Address Book. This module manages all adult contacts associated with your church, ministry or charitable organisation. Through the Address Book, you can manage people's contact details, record and track engagement, carry out common admin workflows, communicate and produce reports.

The Address Book is not intended for children and young people (typically under-18s); the Children module is designed for those in your organisation's children or youth ministry. You can maintain parent/carer details in the Address Book and link children to their parents/carers, or, for children whose parents/carers are not actively involved, you may choose to store parent/carer details against the child.

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.

Address Book features at a glance

• Simple workflows to add new people or import your existing contact data.
• Contact 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 person's communication options, privacy settings and consent.
• Categorise your Address Book contacts using tags.
• Maintain details of each person'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.
• Produce printable contact directories.
• Make use of intuitive bulk action to perform updates of information for multiple people.
• Benefit from functionality that's designed with privacy, GDPR best compliance and safeguarding best practices in mind.
• Customisable Address Book Embed form for newcomers to submit their contact details and areas of interest via your website.
• Send invitations 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: People 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 Address Book 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 Address Book module is the core repository for adult Contacts. Those people could include members (with varying levels of engagement with your church or charity), non-members and other contacts of interest whose personal details you are permitted to store.
• 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. Key dates include Baptisms, Confirmations, Weddings, First Visits or the date of a bereavement. You may want to maintain records of dates of certain discipleship milestones, such as participation in key events or courses or administrative milestones, such as membership or training.
• My ChurchSuite is your church's member-facing platform. It allows contacts 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 children groups, for all other people-grouping needs, tags are a must! For example, you might tag your Members, your Newsletter Subscribers or those you consider Leaders. Tags show on people's profile pages, giving immediate insight into people's engagement with your organisation. 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!