March 2010  Issue

You've heard those words before, but would your congregation say they are in goods hands?  Is your church doing a good job assimilating new members and  tracking the needs of prospects and members?  This month, our focus is how the Connections module can help you do both. Our writers, Barry Moon and Keith Hudgins, as well as other ACS Implementation Specialists, spend most of their time on-site helping churches customize ACS modules to fit their needs. Maybe their ideas will help you. If you’d like more information about how an Implementation Specialist could improve your productivity, check out the Implementation link in our Resources section.

Imagine receiving an e-mail from a member of your church entitled “Please Help- 4th time sent.” I know of a church who received such an e-mail. It seems that they had a member who was in a difficult situation and needed assistance from the church. Through a series of miscommunications and unclear instructions, this member’s plea had gone unaddressed and the situation grew worse. When someone had a need, it was the practice of the church for staff members to send an e-mail to the person responsible for following up, but there was no tool available to staff or members for documenting and managing the outcome or results of such outreach opportunities.

You will be happy to know that the person finally received the care that they needed, but the incident was an eye opener for that church. In fact, this experience set them on a path toward finding a way to better connect with those who were in need, those who were interested in participating in certain ministries, and those with prayer needs. They also needed a tool to aid them in their assimilation of new guests. One of their goals was to involve more members in the outreach process, allowing them to follow up with needs and address them.

The answer to their ministry need was ACS Connections in conjunction with Access ACS. ACS Connections is a module within the ACS People Suite. Access ACS is an online tool that can integrate with your existing Web site, allowing members access to specific information from the database. Using these tools together allows church leaders to indentify and classify needs and assign others to follow up. Those who are assigned to follow up on these “connections” can enter notes about their outreach assignment and close the connection, allowing staff and pastoral-care teams to make sure that all outreach is completed in a timely manner. This combination enables more people to do more in the area of outreach.

Real Life Application

Here are a couple of applicable examples that can help explain how ACS Connections and Access ACS are being used today by churches just like yours to provide better follow-up.

Church “A” wants to personally call on all first time guests within 24 hours of their first visit. They implemented the ACS solution to help with this. On Sunday, all guest cards are entered into ACS. Once they are in the database, an outreach connection is created for each person or family. This connection is then assigned to a specific member for the purpose of following up with the guest. Once all the connections are completed, the church uploads them to Access ACS. After they are uploaded, an e-mail is automatically sent to the person with the assignment letting them know to log in to Access ACS so that they can find out who they are to call. Once the member makes the call, he or she can record any pertinent information online and close the connection. This has streamlined the assimilation process for Church “A”, allowing faster assignments and easier documentation.

Church “B” needs to implement a way to inform ministry leaders of people who would like more information about their ministry. On their welcome card are a series of check boxes, allowing guests and members alike to request more information about various ministries. Many of these ministries are led by volunteers. These requests are keyed into ACS Connections and uploaded to Access ACS. Ministry leaders will automatically receive an e-mail informing them that they have an outreach assignment. They are able to log in to Access ACS and find out who is interested in their ministry, follow up with them, and document their results.

As you can imagine, there are many different ways to use the ACS Connections module to improve communication and follow-up with members and guests, such as keeping informed and documenting hospital visits, prayer requests, staff assignments, poor attendance, and other miscellaneous but specific times when members and guests have connected with the church.

Serving as the Director of Technology Services with his local church, Keith is keenly interested in helping other churches succeed in implementing new effective tools in ministry. He has served as a Pastor of Youth and Worship for several churches and loves to take his experience as an ACS administrator and share best practices with other ministries.

ACS Connections is a powerful tool in the ACS People Suite for tracking all types of contacts and communications between individuals and the church. However, many people don’t realize that it can be used to track assimilation of an individual through a process. For example, many of our church clients have a series of membership or discovery classes that they would like their congregants to attend. These classes are part of the church’s assimilation process for getting individuals involved and serving in the church. Connections can be used to help in this assimilation tracking.

Let’s imagine that your church has four membership or discovery classes that meet throughout the year, and they are between 60 to 90 minutes long. You need to track the individual’s attendance, but don’t necessarily need an attendance marking. You could create an inward connection type called Discovery Class (or Membership Class) and associate  responses such as Discovery Class 101 Completed, Discovery Class 201 Completed, etc. to the connection type. When an individual attends the class, you would assign this inward contact to them and the appropriate response tied to the contact. Therefore, if John Doe attended the 101 class, he would have an inward contact—Discovery Class assigned to his record and the response would be—Discovery Class 101 Completed. The date of the contact would be the same as the date of the class.

On John Doe’s profile record, you can view the connections assigned to John Doe and all of the Discovery Classes he attended, the date attended, and the response which tracks which class he attended. If John has a lot of contacts in his record, you can quickly filter the Discovery Classes in the grid by clicking on the column heading for Contact Type and selecting Discovery Class from the list.

 
To review John Doe’s overall progress, use the Connections Reports. Under Connection Reports, go to the Statistics section and select the Contact Response Analysis Report. This report provides a view of individuals and all the responses that are associated with the contact type and displays which responses have been completed by the individual and which have not. This allows the church to determine what remaining courses need to be taken by the individual for issuing an invitation and helps the church track the individual’s overall assimilation process.

If you track other processes, for example a mentoring program which requires several key steps to be completed, Connections may be the tool you want to use. Since Connection Contacts can be assigned either in ACS People or in Access ACS, it allows small group leaders and teachers to help keep track of these processes.

Barry’s knowledge of computers and previous work with people in many church ministries enhances his efforts to help churches grow and be better stewards of their resources. He has 14 years of ministerial work in education and administration, over 10 years of experience as a system engineer in computer support, and over 14 years of experience using ACS software.