This one’s been a long time coming and I’m really excited to introduce it…as we all know, family is a huge part of church life, and keeping track of those family units can be difficult. Up until now, Stafftool has made it easy to specify who’s related to who, but there hasn’t been a way to group those relationships together…until now.
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
Great! Now i just have to get off my duff and start using it more!
A couple thoughts from wacky San Francisco.
The household piece is great as far as tracking goes. Very easy to get folks into the household group. Nice.
A couple of thoughts for what it is worth,
I might change from “Head of Household” to something more egalitarian, especially if you choose to eventually market to non-profits which will tend to be more progressive. In fact, having something else would establish you as more “with it.” Maybe “Primary Household Contact” or something like that would set you apart in I think a positive way.
Along those lines, one of the reasons I wanted the Household feature was on the RARE occasion that mailings are sent out, a common heading could be used. Currently the family heading is marked, “The ______ family” based on the last name of the “Head of Household” We have quite a few couples that do not share a last name, so this may be a little off-putting. Again, I TOTALLY understand the focus and most folks understand, but I wonder if someone is designated “Head of Household” there wold also be a line to fill in, “Mailing Label Heading” or something. Not only would this help to personalize mailings, but you can set a character limit so heading won’t be too long. Again, it would be a subtle way to set yourself apart in a good way.
Just some thoughts.
Hey Bruce, thanks for the awesome feedback, they’re all excellent points. The iteration of the household functionality right now is very much a first pass, so I think most of these points will be addressed. In fact, I’ll definitely change their “head of household” designation to “Primary household contact” like you suggested, that’s a really good call. And as for the listings with the last name, that was pretty much a punt to get the first version out. I think your idea of a custom heading is good, I’ll look into a way to work that in.
Thanks again! I’ll post when I get some of this stuff worked in.
great … just in time for our church christmas card mailing!