Sacraments are integral to the Catholic faith, and tracking sacraments is a key task for parish administrators. You are held accountable for adding and maintaining sacramental records for each parishioner, which can be cumbersome if you don’t have a solution built specifically to do just that. There is now a standard way to store, manage, and report sacramental information within MinistryPlatform.
Track More Details
There are many details within sacraments that you need to track in order to maintain clean records and know where to send notification letters. Here are a few new details you can track within MinistryPlatform Sacraments:
- Church of record, whether that’s where the parishioner is currently registered, another parish in the diocese, or any other location
- The address for the church where the sacrament was received
- Sponsor types, such as Sponsor, Christian Witness, Godparent, Godmother, Godfather, or Next of Kin
- Files and attachments, such as a baptismal certificate
- Notes about the sacrament, such as the burial location for a death record
Maintain Security
As with most of your parish’s data, it’s crucial you maintain accurate sacrament records. For this reason, you want to have tight control over who can add and edit sacramental data. MinistryPlatform will default security for sacrament tables to be visible to any administrator of the Platform. Let’s say you have a volunteer you would like to permit to assist with the data entry of sacraments. As an administrator, you can edit that volunteer’s user record to grant them access to the Sacraments page.
Insights at Your Fingertips
Having data in your Platform is great, but you also have to be able to report on that data at any given moment. For example, you may need to know how many baptisms, confirmations, first communions, and marriages were performed at your parish over the past year. MinistryPlatform will now provide default charts and views to help you gather sacramental statistics. Like any view or chart within the Platform, you can edit those to meet the specific asks of your diocese.
More to Come!
We know that tracking sacraments is just the beginning, which is why we’re continuing to work on bringing you more features within Sacraments. These include:
- Certificate printing for Baptism, First Communion, Confirmation, Marriage, and RICA
- The option to include notations on the back of certificates when printing
- Generating notification letters for First Communion, Confirmation, and Marriage
We are also building out Tools to help you in adding and maintaining sacramental records in MinistryPlatform. These tools will allow you to:
- Add marriage sacraments in the same workflow
- Choose which sacrament type to keep when combining contacts with duplicate sacrament types
Leigh Ann joined the ACST team in 2019 as a Product Marketing Manager. She oversees the launch and overall communication of key solutions to support the church’s needs. Prior to joining ACST, she spent several years in communications and graphic design roles, most notably as a Communications Director for a large church in Florence, SC, where she leveraged Realm to help solve key ministry challenges.
