While Church Social helps congregations move much of their administration, communication and resource sharing online, there are still situations where good old-fashioned paper is desirable. One of those situations is the church photo directory. Many congregations still maintain a printed version of this. And even if they don't, it's still very helpful to provide this option for those members in the congregation who would prefer this medium. That's where our printable family sheets come in very handy!

This is not a new feature of Church Social, but it is one that we have recently overhauled. The family sheets have been redesigned, giving them a bit of a cleaner look. The content is organized a little nicer, especially for families who have multiple phones numbers and email addresses—something that is becoming very common. Further, we've added a Letter version in addition to the A5 (half sheet) version that was available previously.

What's more, in the previous version of Church Social the family sheets were only available to administrators for download. These are now available directly from the family page, from the "Download" button.

The family sheets are generated as high-resolution, print-ready PDF documents. These can be printed from your home printer, or taken to a professional print shop.

Email continues to play a important role in Church Social. We currently send well over 150,000 emails each month between all our churches. And while we use a first-class transactional email service provider, there are always a few pesky emails (roughly 0.1%) that bounce, not making it to the desired destination.

There are many reasons why this happens. The email address may have been entered incorrectly. An email inbox may be full. Someone may have marked a email of ours as spam. An ISP or mail provider may have blocked the message. These problems are unavoidable. Which is why we wanted to make it easier for administrators to deal with them.

Now in Church Social, when an email address bounces, administrators are given more information about what went wrong, and how to resolve the issue. As you can see in the video below, the user profile page now clearly shows when an email address is failing. When you click the "Fix" button, you will be prompted with a message explaining why the email address has failed and some recommended next steps.

Resolving failing email addresses

The three most common steps to resolve a failing email address are:

• Update the email address. Most bounces are due to an email address being entered incorrectly.
• Reactivate the email address. In some rare situations the email address that is bouncing is totally valid, and you simply need to reactivate it to resume sending.
• Contact us to reactivate the email address. In the case of spam complaints, we must request that the address be manually reactivated by contacting our transactional email provider.

Let us know if you have any feedback or questions—we'd love to hear from you!

A lot of people have been asking us for a complete list of all the new features and changes coming in the new Church Social. We created this blog post for that purpose! You can also download this PDF document to share with your congregation.

Ground-up redesign

The current design is over eight years old and is certainly starting to show its age. This new design is modern, clean, and fully responsive, meaning it looks great on desktops, laptops, tablets and phones. The site layout and navigation has changed pretty significantly, and while this will take some getting used to, we feel it's much more simple. Basically all the app features are now one-click away in the main navigation.

Groups

Groups have easily been the most requested feature since day one. Not only are they new in the redesign, but they've actually become an integral part of the app. Groups allow you to message one-another, share documents, create schedules and share group information, and we have more things planned. Here are the types of groups you can create:

• Bible Studies
• Clubs
• Committees
• Mailing Lists
• Office Bearers
• Small Groups
• Wards/Districts

Anyone in the congregation is able to create groups (other than ward and office bearer groups, which must be done by the administrators). When you create a group, you become the administrator of that group, allowing you to edit the group settings, as well as add and remove members.

There are two types of groups: open groups and invite-only groups. Open groups will be things like bible studies, clubs, and mailing lists, which anyone can join, or leave. Invite-only groups, on the other hand, are closed, and members must be invited by the group administrator. This is ideal for committees and small groups.

Messages

Our emailer is by far the most popular feature in Church Social. We send hundreds of thousands of emails each month between all our customers. However, there are some challenges with it. Members can easily get email message overload, especially in larger congregations. There is also no way to have group discussions—messages are very much one-way. Further, if email delivery ever fails (which it does from time to time), those messages are lost forever. We wanted to do better!

In the new Church Social the emailer has been renamed to "messages". All messages are saved within the app, meaning members experiencing issues with email delivery can always find a copy by logging into Church Social. From within the app members can also reply to group messages, making discussions within committees or clubs really easy. And most importantly, members can reduce the amount of messages they receive by subscribing only to the groups that interest them. In fact, members can completely disable email notifications and still read all their messages within the app.

We've always been extremely hesitant about introducing yet another messaging app to our users. For this reason the new messages feature will continue to work great via email. This is especially important for those members who enjoy receiving email communications but don't log into the app frequently.

Member directory

The member directory has been given a face-lift and a few new bells and whistles as well. You can still view the member directory in the classic card view, but we've also added a new list view, which is great as a quick contact information reference. We've even added a new map view, which shows all the families positioned on a map. It's pretty neat to see! Further, we've added a new church setting for your church address. When set, we place your church location on the map as well.

The family page also includes this map view and a long-requested "get directions" button. We've added the ability to now download vCards directly from the family page, making it easy to import members from Church Social into your contacts software. And you can also download PDF family sheets from the family page, useful for those of you who like to keep a paper copy of the member directory.

Files

Another big area of improvement is the document archive, which is now called "Files". We've added the ability to upload multiple files at once. The file sorting is also much more natural, acting more like a normal file system. You can now create sub folders, which is great for keeping things organized. There is also a new "trash" feature to help prevent accidental deletions. Finally, and maybe most importantly, folders now have a comprehensive permission system, allowing fine-grained control over who can see and edit a folder's contents.

Schedules

Schedules are a really useful feature, but they've always taken a bit to get setup. Not anymore! In addition to manually creating schedules, you can now import existing schedules from a spreadsheet.

We've also simplified schedules by removing the "member" and "family" schedule type. All schedules are now the same, and all can have members, families and groups added to them. This gives congregations tons of flexibility around how they create their schedules. For example, you can create a normal member-only schedule, such as a nursery schedule or deacon collection's schedule. Or, you can create a family schedule, such as a host family schedule. Plus, you can create new group schedules, such as a bible study meeting schedule. Or, you can even mix types, and create a home visit schedule, which includes families and office bearers (members).

Finally, as a small bonus, we've added your scheduled dates to the main calendar. This makes it nice and easy to see your upcoming scheduled events at a glance.

Library

You can finally import library books! Many congregations with thousands of books haven't been able to take advantage of this feature, simply because of the workload it required. Searching the library has also been significantly improved. You can search by title, author, EAN or ISBN, type (book/DVD/Audio CD/etc) as well as category. Plus, in the near future, librarians will actually be able to check books out to keep track of which books members have.

Sermons

Like the library, the sermon archive is now much easier to search. You can search by the title, bible text, author and series. Yes, we've added series! We've also added a new "authors" list, so sermon editors don't have to type in the minister's name each time they create a sermon.

Our favourite new sermon archive feature is the new "add texts" functionality when editing a sermon. Previously it was a laborious task to enter in all the bible verses. Now you can simply paste all your bible texts in, and we automatically parse and format them for you.

Council

In the previous version of Church Social, when you assign someone as an office bearer, they were given increased access to member information. This was done in the member directory, when viewing a family. If you were an office bearer each family member had a "more information" button beside them. And while this was okay, it was sort of confusing, and many office bearers didn't even realize this button existed.

In the redesign we've created a whole new "council" section. In here office bearers are able to view reports that will help them with their important role. Reports such as special or notable dates (ie. birthdays, anniversaries, dates of loved ones deaths), membership status reports, ward lists, etc.

Profile

The old "My Settings" page has been renamed to "Profile", and we've combined a few settings into this one page. Like before, users can update their email address and password. This is also where they can set their family photo, which was previously done from the family page. We've also given users the ability to update their own phone numbers. And finally, this is now where users can set their notification preferences, as well as manage any previous unsubscribes.

Live streaming

Many congregations live stream their church services. Church Social now has a convenient way of adding that live stream to the app. Under the new church settings page, administrators can paste in their live stream embed code. Once done, a new "live stream" page will appear in the main menu.

Feature toggles

Another new church setting is feature toggles, which allows churches to enable and disable certain Church Social features. For example, maybe your congregation doesn't use the library features, or maybe you're using some other service to manage your sermons. You can now hide these features from Church Social, simplifying the overall site navigation.

Church-wide privacy settings

In the previous version of Church Social, administrators could set privacy settings on a per-user basis. They could hide birthdays, anniversaries or contact information. However, this had to be done on a per member basis, which was a lot of work if you wanted to apply a privacy rule to all members in the congregation. For example, maybe you wanted to hide everyone's age throughout the app. In the redesign we've made this much easier. From the church settings page you can now toggle these privacy settings church-wide.

Administrators & statisticians

In the redesign the administrator and statistician roles have been merged together. There has been a lot of confusion around what the difference was between these roles. Our original goal was that administrators would be the only people in Church Social able to view all content, making changes when needed. They could also set roles for other members. The challenge was that statisticians were the ones assigning office bearer roles, and they also had the ability to set account passwords. Meaning, statisticians technically had workarounds to see all the things that administrators could. That left us with a choice: we had to either remove the ability for statisticians to manage office bearers and set passwords (essentially crippling the role), or just merge these two roles together, which is what we did in the end.

People searching

Church administrators are going to love the new member management tools. From the new "people" page you can run comprehensive searches, including filters for member status, role, whether or not they have an email address, whether their email address is bouncing, login status, invitation status, baptism status, profession status, gender and more. Plus, when you run a search, and then visit a member page, and then later return back to the search page, the app remembers your previous search!

People and family editing

The edit member and family pages have changed quite significantly. In the previous version of Church Social there were literally 11 different pages for editing a member or family. We've simplified this down to one page! You can view all the member's information from one place, and click "edit" beside each item to make changes. Further, we show the member's family on the right hand side of the page, making it really easy to jump between members of a family. And, speaking of families, you no longer have to create them! Every member is in a family by default, and now you simply add and remove members from existing families. You can even bulk edit family members, more on that below!

Bulk editing

We are really excited about the new bulk editing tool we've added in the redesign. Administrators can now choose members from a search and then bulk edit them. This makes it extremely easy to make bulk edits to your member data. The tool itself looks a lot like a spreadsheet, which makes it easy to compare data and find inconsistencies.

Notes

In the previous version of Church Social, administrators had the ability to set two types of notes for a member: "notes for the statistician" and "notes for the office bearers". The later has caused a lot of confusion. Many churches think this is a tool for office bearers to record member notes. This is not the case. It was simply intended as a way for statisticians to share extra information about members with office bearers. In the redesigned we've simplified this down to a single notes field. Any existing notes (from either field), have been combined into this new field.

Wards and office bearers

Administrators: take note that wards and districts are now managed under groups. Only administrators are able to edit ward and office bearer groups. When you edit a ward, you'll be able to assign which office bearers are responsible for that ward. On the member side, you can set the office bearer role from the edit member page. You also set the family's ward from the member edit page. You can even assign more than one ward to a family, which is a long wanted feature for a few congregations.

Also take note that we've added a new church setting for the name of your pastoral groups. You can choose between the labels "ward" and "districts".

Report builder

Reporting has been a challenge since day one. While Church Social provides a wide range of reports, we've come to realize that every church likes to do things just a little bit different. In the redesign we've added a brand new report builder. This allows churches to create almost any report they want from their membership data. They can then view those reports directly in the app, download them as PDFs, or even export them to a spreadsheet.

As promised a few weeks ago, today is the day we plan to launch the new Church Social redesign! And while we're moving forward with that, we've decided to do a "soft launch" of the app first, only making it available to administrators and statisticians for now. There are a few reasons for this:

First, a number of congregations have reached out to us expressing concerns with launching the redesign without them having the ability to try it first. It's difficult for Church Social administrators to update their congregations on the upcoming changes if they themselves haven't been able to login and look around. Doing a soft launch gives administrators a chance to familiarize themselves with the new app, and provide documentation to their congregations before the official launch.

Second, we're nervous about launching an update of this scale without a little manual testing from the congregations first. While we've done everything we could to make this a great piece of software, it's always possible for bugs or other issues to exist. Doing a soft launch gives us a chance to "kick the tires" before releasing it to all members.

Third, there are still a few pieces of the app, specifically the reporting tools, that we're still finishing up. We're probably only a day or two away on being done those features, but obviously can't launch without them being complete.

So, here's the plan: If you're a Church Social administrator or statistician, expect an email from us later today explaining how to login to the preview app. You will have ten days to test the new Church Social. Assuming no major issues arise, we plan to release to all members on February 10, 2018.

—Jonathan Reinink

It's been over a year since we first announced our plans to do a ground-up redesign of Church Social. You have all been extremely patient with us, especially considering our original mid-2017 goals. Thank you for that. And we've got some great news! We've set an official launch date of February 1, 2018.

This redesign truly represents our commitment to the project long term. It's more than just a new visual design. It's a new technical backbone. This will make the software more secure and easier to develop new features for.

An important change we also intend to make is more frequent release cycles. While this redesign was necessary, we very much understand that months of "radio silence" is not helpful for our customers. Expect to see updates become a monthly, or even weekly occurrence in 2018.

See you in February! 😊

—Jonathan Reinink

Late last year we announced that we had started a ground-up redesign of Church Social. In addition to a brand new look for the app, we promised some exciting new features including a powerful new report builder, a new groups feature, improved document and sermon archives, a new bulletin board and more. We are thrilled with how this is all coming together. And while we don't have an official launch date set, the plan is to release it before the summer is out!

Introducing messages

This redesign has been a great exercise for us. It's pushed us to take a step back and ask some tough questions. For example, in what areas could Church Social be serving congregations better? One area we discovered that needed some attention was the emailer. While this is easily our most popular feature, it has some problems. Members can easily get email message overload, especially in larger congregations. There is also no way to have group discussions. Messages are very much one-way only. Further, if email delivery ever fails (which it does from time to time), those messages are lost forever. We wanted to do better!

In the new Church Social the emailer has been renamed to "messages". All messages will be saved within the app, meaning members experiencing issues with email delivery can always find a copy by logging into Church Social. From within the app members can also reply to group messages, making discussions within committees or clubs super simple. And most importantly, members can reduce the amount of messages they receive by subscribing only the groups that interest them. In fact, members can completely disable email notifications and still read all their messages within the app. There is even a daily digest email, summarizing all unread messages from that day.

We've always been extremely hesitant about introducing yet another messaging app to our users. For this reason the new messages feature will continue to work great via email. This is especially important for those members who enjoy receiving email communications but don't log into the app frequently.

Follow along

If you'd like to follow along with our progress, the best place to do that is on social media. We've been posting sneak preview screenshots of the redesign on Facebook and Twitter.

It's been quite some time since we last gave an update on Church Social. It's amazing how time goes by. It seems like just yesterday we were sharing our plans for 2016, and here we are in mid-November. Once again we've been blessed with a year of growth, welcoming ten new congregations. We added a number of new features, including a new library archive and recurring calendar events. We completed the transition to WordPress for public websites, and were excited to offer free SSL certificates to those customers. We worked hard to improve email delivery rates, with the emailer now sending out well over 100,000 emails per month! We doubled down our support efforts, significantly reducing customer support response times. We even purchased a new domain.

Ground-up redesign

Which leads us to 2017. Aside from bug fixes, we've officially stopped development on the current iteration of Church Social and have begun a ground-up redesign. In preparation for a number of new, big features, it felt like the right time to start fresh. The current design is over six years old, and is starting to show its age. Not only will Church Social be receiving a major face-lift, the underlying source code is being completely rewritten. This is a big undertaking, one we hope will make Church Social more secure, simpler to use, and easier to develop new features for. Here is a sneak peak!

New features

While we're still working out all the details, the redesign will include the following new features:

• Mobile friendly: The new design will be fully responsive, meaning it will look great on tablets and phones.
• Groups: Create custom groups within your church for bible studies, committees, wards and more. Then easily message these groups, create group schedules and share documents.
• Report builder: The member export tool is getting a total overhaul. Generate custom member and family reports using our new reporting engine. Export reports by downloading them as PDF or Excel files.
• Document archive: A greatly improved document archive, with drag-and-drop file uploading, simpler sorting, and improved searching.
• Schedules: You'll finally be able to import schedules in addition to creating them manually. Also, see your scheduled items on the main calendar.
• Library: Get your library books imported quickly with the new Amazon integration, or even just import them from a file. Plus mark books as "checked out" to keep track of which books members are reading.
• Sermon archive: Improved sermon archive searching, including bible passage, date and topical searches. Streamlined sermon uploading, including the ability to upload almost any audio format, not just MP3 files.
• Bulletin board: A new, simple place to share things with your congregation that just don't make sense in your weekly bulletin, calendar of events, or emails to the congregation.

Timeline

Our goal is to have this redesign done by mid-2017. Please keep in mind that we do not plan to make any further feature improvements to the current version of the software. We very much appreciate your patience as we work hard to get this update out the door!

We're excited to announce that we're the proud new owners of the domain churchsocial.com. We've had our eyes on this domain for quite some time, but being a two word "dot com" it came at a high asking price. In fact, the domain was first registered all the way back in April of 2001, roughly 15 years ago!

Fortunately this year we were financially in a position to make a bid for the domain. It felt like the right time, especially in light of the changes in 2015 and our re-commitment to Church Social moving forward. The new domain is easier to remember, shorter to type, and generally more professional than our previous domain.

Practically this has some implications moving forward, most of which will happen automatically:

• Our primary domain will become churchsocial.com effective immediately
• Our old domain churchsocialapp.com will simply redirect to this new domain
• The app will now be found at app.churchsocial.com
• Our support email address is now [email protected]
• Our sales email address is now [email protected]

We do recommend that all Church Social users update their safe-sender list to ensure that they continue to receive our emails without issue. To do this simply add [email protected] to your safe-senders list.

Email is a critical component of Church Social. We send thousands of emails every day, and tens of thousands every month. These emails include messages sent to members using the emailer, schedule reminder emails, welcome emails, password reset emails, and more. Our users rely on these emails, and it's important to us that we achieve high delivery rates. To that end, we've made some exciting improvements to how email works in Church Social.

New service provider

Our biggest change is a new transactional email service provider. After careful consideration, we chose Postmark, a service dedicated to providing extremely high email delivery rates. While this change won't be immediately noticeable to our users, we're hoping it will make a difference in their inboxes. Less lost email. Less email in spam. And much quicker delivery rates.

Tracking of bounced emails

In addition to improving email delivery rates, we've also added some tooling to help in those situations when emails do bounce. This happens most frequently when congregations first join Church Social. A certain percentage of their member's email addresses are incorrect. Previously this was hard to fix, since Church Social didn't tell you which emails were bouncing. Well, now there is an "Failing email addresses" report for just this, found under the member management section. When you update a failing email address that member will be automatically removed from this report.

Subject lines added to the emailer

The emailer also got a nice little improvement. You can now set a (short) subject when sending emails from Church Social. This is a great way to give other members an idea of what you're emailing them about. The subject must be short, 30 characters or less, since it will be appended after the normal subject line. For example, here is what this looks like: Message from Jonathan Reinink: We now have subjects!

Replying to email

And finally, we've made some tweaks to how our HTML emails are rendered. Previously when you replied to an email from Church Social, it wouldn't display very well on some devices, like iPhones and iPads. We've corrected this, so responding to other members is now a little easier.

We hope you enjoy all these improvements!

We are pleased to announce that we are now offering free SSL certificates to all our church website hosting customers. This means that your church website will be available at a secure HTTPS address, in addition to the standard HTTP address.

One of the most requested Church Social features has just landed: recurring calendar events. You are now able to create calendar events that repeat daily, weekly or monthly. Simply enter a event start Date, and then select one of the repeating options from the Repeats drop down list. You can also specify a Repeat until date if the event does not repeat forever. Give it a try, we have done our best to keep this feature nice and simple!

Handling exceptions

One of the biggest challenges with recurring events is handling exceptions. For example, maybe you want to edit the title of only one event in your "Morning worship service" series to indicate that there is Lord's Supper that service. You can do this using the Apply to setting, which includes the following three options:

• All events in this series: Will apply the changes to all events in the series, even those in the past.
• This event and future events: Will apply the changes to the event instance you are editing, as well as all future events in that series.
• Only this event: Will apply the changes to only the event instance you are editing.

Use it carefully

We were a little hesitant to add this feature at first. Recurring events, if not used carefully, can lead to a less reliable calendar. For instance, maybe you have a bible study every other Thursday, except in unique situations. If you do not add an exception to the calendar for those situations, members of your congregation may think there is still bible study those days, when in fact there is not. We now feel the benefits of recurring events outweigh this risk, it is just an important thing to keep in mind as you manage your calendar.

While more and more "stuff" seems to be moving online, one thing many churches still have is a physical library of books. Today we're excited to announce a new Church Social feature that we believe will make these libraries a little more effective: a searchable library book directory.

Found under the archives tab is the new library section, where your church's librarian can add books and categories. Other members can then search and view these books. To get started, simply assign a member of your congregation with the new librarian role.

Coming soon to Church Social is a completely reworked "family sheet generator", which will replace the existing member photo directory binder sheet generator. It will initially have three themes: a classic full page version, a compact A5 version, and also a council information card. This will make it SUPER easy to create printable photo sheets for binder style directories. Stay tuned for more on that!

The Church Social emailer just got a big update. You can now send attachments as well as add basic formatting to your emails (links, bold, italics, lists, etc). The emailer now also auto-saves your message while you type, preventing you from loosing your work.

Let us know what you think!

Today we launched our brand new redesigned website! This new website coincides with some big changes we're making at Church Social. We're now offering WordPress websites and hosting as an alternative to our website builder. This will allow us to focus our energy and resources on building a better app, while still helping congregations create great looking public websites. Have a look around!