Customising your ChurchSuite account

Introduction

Your ChurchSuite account Profile is home to your ChurchSuite Account, My ChurchSuite and My Consent settings. These global settings apply to all users.

By adding your organisation's Data Protection statement - sometimes known as your Privacy Notice - you can ensure greater compliance with Data Protection requirements by surfacing access to your statement on all public-facing and member-facing ChurchSuite forms through which people are submitting personal details as they engage with your various events and activities. For example, those submitting personal details during visitor check-in, event sign-up, small group sign-up, custom forms that you might share, newcomer details forms, and Donate will be required to agree to your Data Protection statement before they can submit a response.

Your account Profile is also home to your ChurchSuite account contact details; the designated individuals that we might need to communicate with from time to time about matters about your ChurchSuite account, billing or data protection.

We've produced a separate support article on Using brands, which includes a section explaining how to customise your default account brand by adding your organisation logo, emblem and colour styling.

Customising your account

Working within the Administrator area, click into the Profile section, which is divided into three tabs - one for your Account settings, one for My ChurchSuite settings and one for My Consent settings. From here you can view current settings, clicking Edit to make changes to the settings within a section. Let's look at each section on the Account tab in turn - the My ChurchSuite and My Consent settings are explained in other related support articles.

The Details section is pre-populated with the organisation Name you specified when you originally signed up for your ChurchSuite trial. Based on the trial signup details provided, your account was created with a preset Timezone, Currency and Language, which you can change if you wish. Start week on controls the first day of the week when using date pickers and when viewing the calendar in ChurchSuite, My ChurchSuite or Embed.

The next section is Data Protection. Here you can optionally add your organisation's data protection statement, sometimes known as your Privacy Notice. Give your statement a suitable Title e.g. Privacy Notice, and add some optional Help text that is surfaced with the "I accept ..." consent confirmation checkbox that people will see on all ChurchSuite forms that collect personal information. The help text typically clarifies what ticking "I accept..." means; for example, you might say something like, "You must read and understand our privacy policy, which explains how we use personal data and your rights about your personal data". Finally, copy and paste your data protection statement as plain text (i.e. your Privacy Notice) into the Statement field. Once pasted you'll be able to further style the Statement text using the HTML editor tools available, including options to add embedded external links and images if you wish.

Having added Data Protection information, the data protection Statement will now be made available on all public-facing and member-facing ChurchSuite forms through which people submit personal details; including My ChurchSuite, visitor child check-in, event sign-up pages, small group sign-up pages, customer-facing booking pages, Donate, custom forms, and the newcomer My Details forms.

Here's an example from an event page where the sign-up form includes an I accept checkbox, a link to the data protection Statement (which when clicked, opens to view in a pop-up), and the Help message that you added clarifying what ticking the checkbox means. For data protection and best compliance, sign-ups are unable to click Proceed until they tick the checkbox.

Continuing down the Profile page is the Email section where you can choose the default Email Template used when composing emails; however, users can override this default and select a different template if they wish. Enable or disable Open Tracking - disabling tracking prevents an open-tracking "pixel" from being added to outbound ChurchSuite emails, which is used to determine 'email open' responses from recipient email providers that support open rate tracking. Open Tracking data records the date and time of an 'email open' only - all other tracking data, such as the recipient user agent and IP address are discarded and are not maintained in your ChurchSuite account.

Finally, there are settings for Contacts and Billing. This is required information and is pre-populated with the details provided when you first signed up to use ChurchSuite. Click Edit to keep these details up to date.

Renaming and re-ordering modules

You can optionally change ChurchSuite's default module names, perhaps to better suit the terminology that is already familiar to your users. For example, if in your context you call your small groups "life groups", "cell groups" or "life communities", this can easily be changed.

To change a module's Name, navigate into that module's Settings by clicking on the cogwheels icon in the top right-hand corner of the module. On the Module Options tab click Edit and change the module Name. The module name change is immediate.

You can also change the display order of the ChurchSuite modules in the module bar. Head to the Modules section of the Administrator area and click any of the up/down icons in the Order column to open the Order pop-up and re-order as appropriate. Changes made are applied immediately and will apply to all users.