Case Study: Managing birthdays in ChurchSuite
Introduction
In a busy church office, it can often be easy to miss a church member's birthday and so fail to wish them a 'Happy Birthday'. In this case study, we'll explore the different ways you can identify when it's someone's birthday and how you can even use ChurchSuite to automatically send a 'Happy Birthday' email/SMS message. In the following article, we’ll be using the Address Book module as an example but the same functionality is available in the Children’s module.
In this article
User Brithdays
Birthdays dashboard widget
How to find someone's birthday
Birthday flow
Adding people to your flow
User Birthdays
For any of your Users who’s User profile is linked to their Address Book contact - and that Address Book contact has a Date of Birth - their birthday will show in your ChurchSuite Calendar.
If one of your users' birthdays isn’t shown on your calendar, it’ll likely be because their User profile isn’t linked to their Address Book contact. To resolve this, you’ll simply need to go to their User profile and link their User profile to their Address Book contact. See the related support article Adding and managing users for more information on linking Users to their Address Book contacts.
Birthdays dashboard widget
Your Churchsuite Dashboard is a great place to see glimpses of information on what’s happening across your Churchsuite account. There’s a Birthdays widget that you can add to your dashboard to see upcoming birthdays in the next 14 days. You can add the Birthdays widget to your dashboard using the + action on the top and bottom right-hand corners of your dashboard.
How to find someone's birthday
For ChurchSuite to know when a contact's birthday is, a contact must have a Date of Birth listed on their profile. A User can edit a contact to add their date of birth on their behalf, or a contact can add their date of birth via the My Details section of their My ChurchSuite account or as part of completing an Ongoing Consent request.
For any contact that has a Date of Birth, you can easily see when their birthday is, directly from the Address Book Contacts area, using the Birthdays preset that’s available from the optional columns filter. Do note that when using the Birthdays preset, by default, only contacts with a date of birth added to their contact will be listed. Any contacts without a date of birth won't be listed.
You can also further filter this list to see birthdays within a given month, using the Month of Birth filter. Clicking on the Birthday column header will reorder this list so the contacts are shown in date order of when their birthday is in that selected month.
Birthday flow
Wishing someone a 'Happy Birthday' is a small admin task that can mean a lot to the person receiving it - but it’s all too easy to miss someone's birthday in a busy church office. Through the use of Flows, you can automatically send your contacts a 'Happy Birthday' email/SMS message. By using Flow automation, this flow will manage itself, removing the need for you to add this to your daily tasks.
We’ll be using the Address Book module as an example but the same process could be followed to create the same flow in the Children’s module. In the case of sending a 'Happy Birthday' email/SMS message to children, the email/SMS message would be sent to their primary parent/carers by default. Here’s how to set this flow up:
To create your Birthday flow, go to the Flows section of the Address Book module. Use the Add flow button to add your Flow. For more information on how to add a flow, see our related support article, Flows.
Having created your Birthday flow, you’ll now need to add a stage to your flow. This stage will be an all-in-one stage, used both as a holding stage and as the stage that will send people an email/SMS message on their Birthday. From the Flow view page, go to the Stages tab and click Add stage.
In the add stage pop-up, give the stage a Name and set the Due date as 12 months after the previous stage. Continue down the pop-up optionally setting which User people will be assigned to when added to this flow (if you're automating this stage, you’ll likely not assign people to a User for this flow, as emails/SMS messages will be sent automatically) and adding a description. Finally, ensure Automated is selected and set a Time you’d like people in this stage to be processed (8am, for example).
Top Tip! To automate or not to automate?
So far in this article, we’ve looked at automating this flow so emails/SMS messages are automatically sent, which is ideal if you have a large address book but don’t have the time to send everyone a message on their birthday manually. However, it may be that you're a smaller or moderate-sized church and you’d like to personalise the email/SMS message that is sent to someone on their birthday.
In this instance, you might decide not to automate the stage, so you manually send your birthday emails/SMS messages when people become due. To help with this, you may wish to add yourself or the person who will be responsible for sending your birthday emails/SMS ;messages as the Flow Manager and select every day in the Send reminders settings of the flow, so they receive daily email notifications of who has become due for processing.
Sending emails to Children
If you'd like to send a 'Happy Birthday' email/SM message to a child - perhaps a teenager in your youth group - you'd need to set up your Birthday flow to run manually, rather than automating it. The reason for this is that, by default, when an email/SMS is sent to a child as part of a flow, the email will be sent to the child's primary parent/carer. You do have the option to send it to the child themselves (provided they have an email address/mobile number on their profile), but you'd need to manually change this when processing the child in the flow on their Birthday.
Having added your Stage to your flow, you’ll now need to add actions to this stage. Do note that you'll need to have created your Preset email or Preset SMS message before adding the relevant action. For guidance on how to create preset emails/SMS messages, see the relevant article, listed below, in the related article section. There are two or three actions you’ll want to add to this stage:
Once you’ve added these actions to your stage, you’ve finished setting up your flow and you’re ready to start adding people.
Adding people to your flow
Top tip - browser windows
If you have two monitors at your workstation, you may find it easiest to have two browser windows open while following the below process to add people to this flow. If you only have one monitor or you’re working from a laptop, you may wish to open two browser windows and adjust their size so they’re side by side.
Before you can add people to your Flow, you’ll first need to identify when the contact's birthday is. To do this, use the Birthday preset as described in the How to find someone's birthday section of this article.
Having identified when a contact's birthday is, use the Add to flow action to add this contact to this flow. Once the contact has been added, amend the date they become due in the flow by clicking on their Due date and changing it to their next birthday. Continue this process for all of the contacts you’d like to add.
As mentioned above, this part of the process will take time, but once this initial task of adding contacts to the flow is completed, the flow will manage itself and you’ll only need to return to this flow to add new people in the future.
Top Tip - Leap Years
Where you have contacts that have their birthday on 29th February, you may wish to create an additional Flow that you can use to process those contacts. Perhaps creating a flow that's handled manually and the due date is set a week in advance so you can manually schedule an email to be sent on the correct day.
Alternatively, if you’d like to still automate this email, perhaps your ‘Happy Birthday' preset email/SMS message can read "Happy Birthday for this week", and the due date can be set as 28th February for those whose birthdays are on 29th February.