Case Study: Managing occasional offices and life events

The ChurchSuite Bookings Module is the ideal solution for managing your occasional offices, including baptisms, weddings and funerals. Often, those requesting or participating in those life events aren't part of your church - using the Bookings module enables you to efficiently manage the booking process, data collection and follow-up separately from your main Address Book of contacts. Generally, booking an occasional office follows something like the process below, which we'll use as a framework to look at how to manage these life events in ChurchSuite.

Getting set up

Before you start processing life events/occasional office bookings, we'd recommend some initial setup tasks - primarily, setting up an initial enquiry Form, then some booking Types, an associated Flow and finally some Prices.

Enquiry form

Using a custom Form in the Address Book module is the best way to collect all the necessary information for those booking weddings, baptisms and funerals. Once created, can you add a link to the form to your website, perhaps into a Life Events page, or indeed, you can share the public form page URL with individuals who get in touch. Our related support articles, Creating Forms and Sharing published forms have a step-by-step guide on how to do that. In this example, we've created a form to collect information from those wanting to get married in our church.

Booking types

The next step to managing your occasional offices in ChurchSuite is to set up Booking Types. Types help to categorise your occasional office bookings and help to ensure that all the necessary information is collected when creating a booking, using the helpful Booking Type Questions. For more information, see the related support article Adding booking types and resources. In this example, we've set up a "Wedding" Type, with Questions to capture all the relevant information required by the denomination (perhaps your Diocese or Area Leadership). For every booking of this type, those questions will surface - carefully consider which of those questions, if any, are required, to allow module users to save the booking where they may not yet have all the answers to those questions.

We also recommend adding task checklists to your booking type, allowing you to set dates and check off tasks prior to and after your booking. This will ensure your relevant processes are followed throughout. See our related Support Article, Task checklists, for more information.

Booking prices

For many churches, the denomination sets a standard price for weddings, funerals and baptisms. For example, in the Church of England, the Diocese will often set a standardised fee that all churches must charge for a wedding. Booking prices are a great way to save time in this process.

You can quickly add charges to a booking corresponding to the correct booking type. Likewise, you could also add Prices for other commonly charged life event items, such as church bells, confetti or candles, using a Resource price. For more information, see the related support article Booking prices.

Flows

Flows are an ideal way to track someone through the process of booking an occasional office. Map out your process that an individual wanting to book an occasional office will need to follow, and create a flow to match that process. We've helpfully added some example Flows for you to install to get you started, but if you'd like to create your own, our related support article on Flows contains a guide on how to do so.

What next?

Now that you've set up your Form, Type and Prices, you're ready to start receiving enquiries and begin following the workflow outlined above. You may wish to link to your enquiry form(s) on your website, perhaps under a 'Life Events' page, so that people who are interested in making a booking can submit an enquiry. Let's imagine you've received an enquiry through your form and you now need to process the booking. What's next?

1. Creating a customer and adding them to a flow

We're going to manage the rest of the process in the Bookings module. The first thing we'll need to do is create a customer - this will be the primary contact for this booking. For a wedding, that might be one of the couple; for a christening, it might be a parent; for a funeral, perhaps the next of kin or funeral director. Navigate to your list of customers, then click Add customer and fill out all the data you've collected on your enquiry form. If your customer is already in your ChurchSuite Address Book, then you can link their contact to the customer information, auto-filling the contact information. Click Save to create the Customer.

In the Engagement tab of your customer profile, you have the option to Add to flow.

Proceed to add your newly created customer to your Wedding Booking flow.

2. Creating a booking

Now that your customer is in the appropriate Flow, you can follow your usual process, tracking their progress along the way. The next step, once you've agreed on a date with the customer, is to create the booking itself and add the associated resources. This will help when adding charges later on. See our related support article Adding and Viewing Bookings for a guide on how to create your booking. Ensure that you add the customer you're working with as the assigned booking contact.

Having set up associated questions in the booking Type, you'll now be able to fill out all the information gathered in your enquiry form and attach it to the Booking itself:

After creating your booking, you will be asked to Add resources. Add any relevant resources necessary for the wedding; for example, the Church would likely be needed for a wedding, so add the relevant rooms in the church as appropriate. Booking resources can always be added, edited and removed.

For more information on Bookings, Adding and viewing bookings and Linking bookings and events, see the related support articles below.

3. Adding charges and sending the booking

At the appropriate point, add Charges to the Booking to enable the customer to pay directly through your ChurchSuite account. Navigate to your Booking and to the Charges tab. Use the Add and Suggest Charges buttons to create the necessary associated charges.

You're now ready to send the booking and all the associated information and charges to the customer. Use the Send booking action in the Communicate menu to send out the Booking to the customer, where they'll be able to click through to the Booking Page and pay any associated charges. When using the Send Booking workflow, you're able to optionally select which information you'd like to include in the email:

4. Anniversaries

It may be that part of your practice and ongoing invitation to church life is to send an anniversary card to those who get married or baptised, or to the family of those who have passed away. ChurchSuite can help manage that - in your Wedding Flow, for example, simply add a final stage, whose due date is set to a year from now (or however long you'd like), that will then trigger a reminder email to a flow manager to send that customer an anniversary message. You could even consider using the automation feature of flows to automatically send the message!