Office-bearer visit tracking

We are excited to announce our brand-new visit tracking feature for elders, deacons, and pastors! This is a feature we've been working on for many months, and with the home-visit season starting, it's the perfect time to release it!

This feature allows church leaders to track both past and future member visits within the app, helping ensure that all members are regularly visited. It also helps elders, deacons, and pastors coordinate their visits better, avoiding situations where a family may go without a visit for a year and then receive multiple visits in the same week.

New visits are created from the calendar page, which conveniently displays both your own visits and those being made by other office-bearers. This keeps everyone informed about the visits taking place.

There is also an option to include notes when creating visits, making it easy to reference them in the future if needed. Given that these notes may contain sensitive information, we've taken great care to ensure that only those who should see them can. We've provided a variety of settings for churches to control which office-bearers can view visit notes—whether it's only those who went on the visit, those within the same shepherding group (ward/district), those with the same role (elder/deacon), or a combination of these settings.

Church Social will also send office-bearers an email reminder the day before a scheduled visit—just in case they forget (though we know they won’t!).

In the reports area, there is a new "Family Visits" section, which includes the following reports:

• Visits: A complete list of all past and future visits, which can be filtered by date, visit type (elder/deacon/pastor), who made the visit, who received the visit, shepherding group, and more.
• My visits: Same as the "Visits" report but automatically filtered to show only your own visits.
• Longest without a visit: This report highlights families who have gone the longest without receiving a visit—helpful for identifying higher-priority visits.
• Most frequently visited: This report shows which families have received the most visits.

There is also an option to mark visits as "reported on." This provides a simple way to track which visits have been reported at council, consistory, or deacon meetings.

Finally, we’re already working on other improvements, such as making it easy to view a list of all past visits for a family from their profile page. Stay tuned for that!

If you'd like to start using the visit tracking feature in your church's account, have your Church Social administrator enable it in the settings area.

Enjoy!