Did you know that—in mere seconds—you can locate everybody in your church who shares the same marital status, denominational background, or birth month? You can find all your congregants who live in the same zip code area and play the piano or who use Facebook and Twitter. Any combination of characteristics that you record in Realm can be called up almost instantly. You might even have fun doing it.
Realm’s custom queries search your records for any mix or match of congregants you need. But the best comes later—when you use that list of names to create communications, group enrollments, login invites, directories, spreadsheets, field updates, and more, using all the records at once.
Custom queries let you search and update hundreds or thousands of records at the same time, tapping into the true power of database computing. This is how large companies accomplish so much so quickly and cheaply. And if you’re using Realm, it’s available to your church—ready to empower your ministry the same way.
We find that a lot of people avoid using custom queries because they think they’re too complicated, but if you break down your task into pieces, it becomes much clearer. And the more custom queries you create, the easier it gets.
I firmly believe that making custom queries is the most powerful and useful task you can perform in Realm, and I’m going to leave you with that teaser because, instead of showing you how to make custom queries, I’m going to send you to our help page. It includes a video and a printable tutorial that you can use at your own pace while becoming your church’s custom query expert.