Case Study: Managing occasional offices and life events

Introduction

The Bookings Module is the ideal solution for managing your life events and occasional offices, including baptisms, weddings and funerals. Often, those requesting or participating in these life events aren't part of your church, so 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.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some steps related to setting up various areas of the Bookings Module to collect and store the data you need for various life events.

In principle, for each type of life event, you will follow a similar pattern: set up (which you’ll need to do initially but shouldn’t need to repeat) and enquiries (which you’ll do each time someone enquires).

Set up

• Add a specific booking Type for the life event type
• Add relevant booking type Questions
• Create a booking Enquiry Form
• Add relevant Prices for the booking Type
• Create a flow to track the process (optional)

Then, when you receive an enquiry:

• Add the customer to the flow
• Confirm the booking
• Add Charges
• Communicate with the customer

Church of England Examples

We've set up some Example booking Types and Prices for Church of England customers, allowing you to install with a few clicks booking types for each of your occasional offices (Baptisms, Funerals and Weddings), along with associated questions, enquiry forms and the Church of England Parochial fees for the present year as prices. This makes the set up stage for managing life events quick and easy.

To install on your account, navigate to the Types area of the Bookings module and choose the type you'd like to install from the Example menu.

You'll be asked to confirm if you'd like to install the example type and will be informed what will be installed.

Once installed, your booking type will include type Questions, which can be added to, edited or removed as necessary...

...and a Booking Enquiry Form is prepared, surfacing questions relevant for someone arranging the life event in question.

Additionally, for customers with accounts in England, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey, the current year's Church of England Parochial fees for that type will be applied as Prices associated with the booking type.

This is your set up complete - you can now skip to point 5 in the Next Steps below!

For customers with booking types already added for your occasional offices, or who wish to apply new Church of England Parochial fees each year, you can choose to install Prices only by navigating to the Prices area of the Bookings module and choosing the prices you'd like to install from the Example menu. (Customers with accounts in England, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey only)

Select which existing type you'd like to apply the prices to and click Install - these prices will now be applied to the selected booking type.

Next Steps

1

Add a Booking Type and enable enquiries - click here to read how

2

Add relevant booking questions, perhaps mirroring an existing paper based form - click here to read how

3

Design your booking enquiry form using the simple drag and drop interface to set up your form with all the information you need to collect from a customer - click here to read how

4

Add booking prices to make adding charges to confirmed bookings easier - click here to read how

5

Customise your Enquiry form success message and Enquiry form confirmation email. - click here to read how

6

Customise your Payment instructions and your Payment confirmation email - click here to read how

7

Assign one or more managers to be notified when an enquiry is received - click here to read how

8

Consider how you'd like to handle resources that may be needed for a customer's booking - you can let customers choose their own resources by adding specific resources to your enquiry form setup; or you may wish to collect generic resource interest in a booking question and have a Bookings module user assign appropriate resources to the booking as part of your enquiry approval process - click here to read how

9

Access the enquiry form link to share with prospective customers - click here to read how

10

Run a test by submitting a booking enquiry to make sure the prospective customer's user experience is seamless. Once you're happy, you're ready to receive your first booking enquiry!

11

Familiarise yourself with how submitted enquiries are shown in the Bookings module and how new customer records are added - click here to read how

12

Consider your enquiry approval processes, including what you'll communicate to customers if their enquiry is approved or declined. For emails that you typically send time and again, you can create Presets that can be further personalised prior to sending - click here to read how

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!