So, while there were some great ideas brought up in the thread that I have plans to discuss and explore further, I really wanted to get some simple functionality out there right away so you all could start kicking the tires. Essentially, you can now set any event to track attendance. This makes most sense on repeating events, such as Sunday service, as you’ll soon see, but you can also record attendance on a single event if you’d like as well. To do so, just check the new box in the event form and update.

This will enable attendance tracking for that event, which you can see in the new tab that appears in its info card.

No, the first time you click on that tab for an event, you’ll be greeted with an empty chart and attendance table, along with a little quick entry form at the bottom.

Your cursor will already be focused on the number entry field, and today’s date will already be selected. So, if you’re recording your service’s attendance right after service, all you’ll have to do is type in the number and hit return and it’ll be added. You’ll notice that the chart right below the tabs will update. It won’t look like much the first time, but over time you’ll start to see some trends. For now, it will max out at showing you the attendance trend for the most recent 10 dates you’ve entered. Here’s a sample of an event that has 10 attendance tally entries:

As you can see the chart is very simple and just meant to show you the general trends over time. The top of the chart is denoted with the highest count during that time period to give you some context.

That’s pretty much it at this point…really basic, but really useful to start keeping track in one place and get a quick overview of how things are going. I have more plans for improving what’s there now, and like I said, the discussion on the forums has a lot of great things to consider for future enhancements…but let me know what you think so far!

Stafftool, being a web-based application, of course runs in your web browser with nothing special to install or keep updated on your computer or servers. In fact, that’s one of the best parts of using web apps.

However, there’s a certain appeal to having a specialized program on your computer for some things…it makes it feel a bit more “real” to see a program icon in your dock, waiting for you to click on it to get some serious business done. Also, it would be nice to have something productive like Stafftool or your Gmail account open in something that won’t be affected by something like a Rickroll gone bad or someone’s bloated MySpace profile page that takes your entire browser down. It would be great to be able to separate the things you need open from the things that are nice to have open…but how?

The answer? Site specific browsers. In this post I’ll show you how easy it is to create a Stafftool “application” on your Mac.

First off, this specific tutorial will only be applicable to Mac users who are running OS X 10.5 (Leopard) since we will be using an app called Fluid that is built specifically for Leopard. If you’re running Mac OS X Tiger or Windows, you can give Mozilla’s Prism a try.

First, download and install Fluid. Then, download the high-resolution Stafftool dock icon so it’ll look good in your dock. Then, open up Prism and you’ll be greeted with a small form to set up your app. Fill it out so it looks like this, with your Stafftool account’s subdomain in place of demo.

Then, click the create button and let it do its thing. When it’s finished, you’ll see this dialog:

Click “Launch Now” and your app will open and you’ll see the Stafftool logo in your dock.

From then on, it’ll act just like it does in your browser except it’s its own app, so if your Safari crashes your Stafftool app will stay open. There are also a few cool things that this specialized app enables that a normal browser doesn’t.

Just like Mail.app has a badge on its dock icon that lets you know how many unread emails are in your inbox, this app will also have a badge letting you know how many unread messages are in your Stafftool inbox.

You can also right click on the Stafftool dock icon and you’ll see a few special menu items — New Message, New Event, New Person, and Search. You can click any of those menu items anywhere within the app and the respective menus will appear. For instance, if you’re in the Messages section and you click the New Person dock menu item, the new person entry form will appear. Other than those few things, though, it’s the same Stafftool you know and love. All your keyboard shortcuts will still work, everything will still look nice and smooth, but you’ll just be able to get to it at any time with a quick click on the dock. Enjoy!

First up - Improved Searching.

You can now search in the iPhone version. Need to look up someone’s info really quickly but don’t know their last name or don’t want to go through a few pages of contacts? Just search!

Simply click on the search icon and a search form will appear. Just type in what you’re looking for and click the go button. If your search results in one contact match, you’ll be taken directly to that person’s page, otherwise you’ll be shown a list of results.

Now, if you use Firefox, you know it’s a great browser. You might even know there are other search engines available in the search field where Google usually sits. And, if you’ve really dug into Firefox, you’ll also know that you can add other search engines to that list. I’ve got good news - you can now add your Stafftool account to that list of available search engines for easy access to your information at any time.

Adding Stafftool is easy…just go to your account in Firefox and you’ll notice that the drop down menu will have a bit of a glow to it:

Click on that glowing menu icon, and you’ll see this:

Click the Add “Stafftool” menu option and you’ll be greeted with the Stafftool specific search box!

Now, as long as you’re logged into your account, you can enter anything you’re looking for, such as someone’s first name, or the name of an upcoming event. Type it in, hit enter and you’ll be taken to your Stafftool account with either a listing of results or the person you’re looking for.

Next up - iCal Organizers

The ability to add organizers to events was recently added. However, it didn’t carry over to the public iCal feed that is available to subscribe to. So, that’s been added. Now, when you view an event that has an organizer (iCal only allows one organizer per event to the best of my knowledge) they’ll show up and you can email them.

Much easier to see who to contact with any questions.

Enjoy!

It’s pretty easy to set up. Simply edit the person you’d like to make a limited profile from, and near the bottom of the form, make sure the “published” option is selected, and you’ll see a new option for “limited profile.”

If you click that, two new checkboxes will appear for email and phone. Go ahead and choose which means of contact you’d like to make available, if any, and update the person’s record. From then on, anyone who logs in without advanced permission will only see that person listed in the people section, but their name will not be linked to their detailed info card, and only the checked items will appear in the list. For instance, with the options in the example image, only their email address will appear, even if they have a phone number in their profile. They could just as easily have both available, or neither. Admins with the correct permission, however, will be able to view all their info like normal.

This will now give your congregation a lot more control over the information they want to make available to everyone else, and will enable people to be listed without making everything open to the entire church. Let me know if you have any questions or comments!

(Also available on our new support site forum)

1. Make sure your iPhone or iPod Touch is updated to version 1.1.3
2. Go to your Stafftool (http://yoursubdomain.stafftool.com) in Mobile Safari
3. When you’re on your dashboard screen, click the + icon on the bottom bar
4. Click the “Add to Home Screen” button
5. On the resulting dialog, shorten the name to just “Stafftool” and wait until the image of the dashboard on the icon turns to the Stafftool icon
6. Click the “Add” button

You will now have a button that will take you directly to your Stafftool right from the home screen!

There are two ways to import people into your Stafftool account - from industry standard vCard files or from CSV files. Importing from vCard files is the best way to go as they are expressly designed for storing and transfer contact information and Stafftool can import them seamlessly, even bringing in any photos that may be embedded in the vCard files. If you currently have your people in a program such as Mac OS X Address Book, getting your contacts into a vCard file is easy. I’ll go through the process of importing vCards using Address Book as an example.

vCard importing

First, you’ll want to go through your contacts and create a group for all the people you’d like to be in your Stafftool database.

Once you have all your people into a group, you can simply drag the folder out of Address Book and onto your desktop (or any other folder on your Mac) and you’ll have a .vcf vCard file.

This one file has all the contacts within that group. Once you have that ready to go, open up the people section of your Stafftool and click on the Import People button on the right side.

This will open up the importing sheet. The default tab at this time is for CSV files, so just click on the vCard Import tab and you’ll be greeted with a simple form where you can attach as many vCard .vcf files from your computer’s hard disk as you need.

From there, select your vCard files (I’ve attached my card in addition to the Church group one to demonstrate)

Then, just click the “Create Import” to initiate the import and after a few moments your new people will be in your database. That’s all there is to it!

As you can see, importing from vCard files is straightforward from Apple’s Address Book application. It’s possible to export vCard files from Microsoft Outlook, although in order to export more than one person at a time, a third party plugin will be needed, most of which can be purchased for around $20. Also, although Stafftool supports CSV importing directly, which I’ll go over next, you can also use the CSV to vCard converter if you’d prefer to have a one-step import and have a vCard copy of your contacts after you import them. Otherwise, read on.

CSV importing

If you’re like many other organizations, you’ve got a lot of peoples’ information stored in spreadsheet files that get emailed around and get out of sync. Luckily, we can get those spreadsheet files into Stafftool without too much work.

Basically, we need to get those Excel or Numbers files into the text based CSV format. I don’t have access to Excel at this time, so I’ll go through it with Numbers, although the process is pretty much the same from any spreadsheet.

The main thing to do in your spreadsheet app is make sure the structure of the table is clean and that you have a good header row that clearly labels what each column is, as this will help you with mapping your existing data to Stafftool. The other thing to be sure of is that there are no extra columns or rows in your final export, just the information that you need. Then, export to a CSV file.

Once you have your CSV file, you can go to your Stafftool account’s people section and click the Import People button and you’ll see the default CSV import form.

Browse to and select your newly created CSV file and optionally choose some groups to make the people you are importing members of. Then, click on Create Import to go to the second step of mapping your spreadsheet header columns to Stafftool’s fields.

In this example we’re mapping the fields from the spreadsheet’s header row with the corresponding fields in Stafftool’s database. Some things to take note of:

• Since the spreadsheet file had each person’s full name in one field, we choose “Name (Full)” in the drop down, and Stafftool will split the name apart and assign them to first and last names (which may not always be correct, but usually is)
• We assign the addresses to each person’s home address. Similar to the “Name (Full)” option, if addresses are stored all in one field, you can choose “Home Address (Full)” and we’ll attempt to parse it out into the individual fields. Again, it might not come through perfectly, but it should help.
• Up to 5 extra misc columns from the spreadsheet can be assigned as notes for that person

Then click on the Create Import button and the people will be imported into your database. At this time, the importing happens in real time after you click the import button, so it’s a good idea to do limited numbers of people per import. Soon, all imports will be queued so that you can do larger sets, but for now try to break them into groups of 100 or less. I’ll post an update once this limitation is removed.

Get Importing

Hopefully this helps explain how to get people into your Stafftool without having to type everything in, and that the importing features will help you get you rolling with your Stafftool account even faster. If you have any questions or comments, leave them here!

I always knew I wanted to do a mobile version of Stafftool and the iPhone was a perfect first step - nice big screen, standards compliant browser with great CSS and Javascript support, and good integration with other services such as the phone and Google Maps. In this post I’m going to go over the features and benefits of the iPhone version, and in a future post I’ll go over how I did it.

So my main goal with the iPhone version was to provide as much of the app that would make sense in a mobile setting, while keeping it lean and nice to use. I concentrated almost solely on information retrieval, with the only data creation at this time being notes on people. This may expand in the future, but it’s a good starting point and covers probably 80% of what people will be using it for - getting church information they need while on the road. Let’s take a look at the features.

(Oh yeah, all the screen shots are taken on iPhoney for the Mac.)

Dashboard

Just like on the normal interface, the iPhone Dashboard gives you a listing of your most recently received messages and upcoming events, albeit less of each.

This makes it really easy to quickly get any recent messages or see what events are going on at a glance. Along the top there are tabs for People, Events and Messages in addition to the Dashboard.

People

Here you have access to your entire database of people right from your iPhone without cluttering your everyday phone book with the entirety of your congregation.

This is perfect for when you’re out and about, away form your computer but you have to look up someone’s information that isn’t in your normal phone book. You can scroll through any of the people and tap on any row to view that person’s information.

Here you can see that the full suite of information is available, and that if you click any of the blue buttons, they’ll trigger integration with the iPhone’s built in apps - phone numbers will ask you if you want to dial the number, emails will start an email addressed to them, and clicking their address will map it in the Google Maps app where you can the proceed to route directions to it. You can also view, as well as create notes.

And, to make getting to people easier, there’s the last name letter rolodex style filtering. However, since the iPhone is a touch screen, and lots of us have less than nimble fingers, you don’t have to actually hit the tiny letter to go to it. Instead, clicking up on the letter bar will instead bring up a big fat finger-friendly version for easy clicking.

Events

Events lets you retrieve all the information you need to for everything going on at the church, just like the normal web app. If your iPhone is vertical, you’ll see all the events in the list view.

Click on any of the events and you can see all the event’s information.

And for a bit of pure iPhone magic, when you rotate your iPhone sideways, the list view will automatically turn into a calendar view.

And here’s a blurry video showing it in action:

You really have to try that one out

Messages

Messages lets you retrieve all the messages you’ve received, letting you stay in the loop away from your computer. The main page lists them all:

And clicking on a message lets you read it.

The Future

So as you can see, the iPhone version is already super useful and is actually really fun to use. However, I’m not completely finished with it yet, so it’ll continue to get even better. Some things I have in mind are real time searching of people for even easier lookup, and replying to messages. And, I’m sure there are some other things that you all will give me as you use it!

In celebration of the official launch of Stafftool and the iPhone version, there will be a special promotion where we give away an iPhone or two so be sure to be on the lookout for that, more information is coming soon!

Check this box for them and click update, and that’s all there is to it. If you click on that “View Grouped by Family” button again, you’ll see a new family listing:

Stafftool will automatically list the head of household, their spouse and any children and group them together as a family household. So, all that needs to be done is to make sure that the people in your database have all their relationships set and the heads of households are specified, and everything else just falls into place.

Also, to go along with this, a new relationship type has been added - Roommates. Now, if people from your congregation live together as roommates, they’ll still be listed as a household, just set one of them as the head.

(updated to Primary Household Contact per Bruce’s observation…good call!)

These new family household groupings are perfect for things like snail mail lists - imagine you have a Christmas card you’d like to send out to the congregation. Up until now, that would have meant exporting your database from Stafftool into something like Excel and manually removing the overlapping people who live together. Now, simply go to the family view and export to CSV and every head of household’s information will be exported, ready to mail merge.

Now, there’s a couple things that should be brought to your attention…first, if you have a large database of people and specifying all these heads of households seems like a daunting task, feel free to contact me for assistance. With a few rules specified, I can automatically set every person in your database who doesn’t have any relationships as the head of their household, as well as all the husbands or wives of every spousal relationship, for example. I’ve already done this for one church and it works just fine, so feel free to contact me if you need assistance. Again, this really relies on your relationships being specified and up to date, so if they’re not now’s the time to get them up to speed!

Second, at first I was concerned that this method would create a situation such as a grown adult who is the head of their own household being listed within the household of their parents if they all attend the same church. However, after using it for a bit I realized that this new view serves dual roles - to enable an easy way to create a mailing list or directory of only the information that is shared between family members, but to also visualize the familial relationships that are created between people. For example, although I don’t physically live with my parents and am the head of my own household, I am still rightfully listed as part of their family. However, if a mailing list is exported, we would both still receive the correspondence since we’re both set as the heads of our households. So, it nicely encapsulates both the relationships that exist as well as locational groupings.

Hope this helps you get your congregation even further organized… official launch is almost here, so if you have any thoughts, feedback or questions, please let me know!

Tags: people, families, households, features

It’s really easy, just name the smart group, choose some available attributes from the dropdown and choose or fill in the detail, and add as many as you’d like to be more fine grained. In this example, we’ll have a virtual group of all people who are married and under 30. You can then show all the people in your database who match these criteria and send them a message, export them to a CSV file to use in another program, or just get a better idea of who makes up your congregation.

Here’s a screenshot of some smart groups that were created by a pastor using Stafftool, so they’re real live, working smart groups:

As you can see, they’re all useful groups to keep tabs on, and really gives you a quick slice of your congregation with the people counts. This, being a church with lots of young people, has a large makeup of single, college aged folks. Any time an event is being planned for young single people, it will be a simple matter of sending a message to the singles smart group, or even creating a new one for single people under 30, if that’s the target group. All of these virtual groups, in addition the the “physical groups” such as ministries and staff groups, make it really easy to stay in communication with both actual ministries as well as specialized demographics. As you can see, it also helps keep on top of peoples’ upcoming birthdays!

The other improvement was to messaging, which received an internal overhaul. The main difference is that, while the previous version displayed all messages within the groups you belong to, the new version actually delivers individual messages to the recipients. This allows users to see if a message has already been read, as well as delete their copy of the message from their inbox.

Staff and the sender can also delete the original message, which will remove all the individually delivered copies as well. In the future, we’ll also be able to tell how many people have read the message, and even who, which will help with seeing how many people are reading your notifications.

Lots more cool stuff coming up on the road to launch, stay tuned!