We've updated all the Excel exports in Church Social to improve date handling. Previously, date columns were exported as plain text values, like "November 7, 2024". With this update, we now explicitly set the date data type, making it easier to work with dates in Excel.

The response to the new office-bearer visit tracking feature has been very positive—almost half of the churches using Church Social have already enabled it! We're thrilled to see that you’re as enthusiastic about this feature as we are.

This week, we made a few minor adjustments to the visits feature. This is fairly common when rolling out a major new feature, as we receive feedback from churches that helps us make small improvements.

First, the calendar now only displays your own visits, not those of other office-bearers. Initially, we thought it would be helpful to see all visits in the main calendar, but in practice, this made it more cluttered and made it harder to see your own visits. If you want to see what other visits are happening in your church, simply go to the reports area and view the "Visits" report or the "Week overview" report.

On the topic of visits in the calendar, our iOS and Android apps have also been updated to include visits in their calendars. Just make sure you’re using the latest version of the app (v1.2.0 or newer), or they won’t appear.

In the reports area, you may notice that the "Most frequently visited" report has been removed. While this was an interesting idea, we’re not convinced it provides much value to office-bearers and could even have unintended downsides, such as prompting questions like, "Why is this particular family getting so many visits?" That said, if you found this report helpful, you can recreate it as a custom report using the family report builder.

Finally, you can now export visits from the "Visits" report to either Excel or CSV. Please note that, due to their sensitive nature, visit notes are not included in this export.

We hope you find these improvements helpful!

When sending new messages, the recipients list now displays each person’s email address beside their name, making it easier to identify individuals when multiple members share the same name—a surprisingly common occurrence!

We've also added a new "view recipients" link that opens the recipients list dialog. This dialog has always been available through the total recipients count, but this wasn't very obvious, so we hope this change makes it more discoverable.

The recipients dialog is particularly helpful, as it not only shows everyone included in the message but also allows you to add exclusions. Ever wanted to send a message to everyone except one or two people? Perhaps you're arranging a surprise birthday party for your pastor and don’t want him or his wife to see the message. You can easily handle that with exclusions—available directly in the recipients dialog.

The calendar just got a facelift! We've refined the design to make everything a bit more compact, fitting all those important church events more neatly while also simplifying the overall look to make the calendar feel less cluttered.

The mobile version has been completely overhauled. Instead of listing all events for the entire month—which could be overwhelming on a phone—you’ll now see just this week's events, with easy access to view events from other weeks in the month.

We’ve also added ages for birthdays and anniversaries (if permitted by your church's privacy settings), so you can quickly see how old someone is turning or how long a couple has been married.

On top of the visual improvements, we’ve introduced a new "Filter" option, allowing you to display only the types of events you're interested in. It's a great way to cut down on the noise when you want to focus on specific event types.

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!

The "Week overview" report, which is available to administrators, statisticians, report managers, and office-bearers in the reports area, just received a facelift.

You can now click on entries in this report to visit their respective pages elsewhere in the app.

You can also now filter which types of events (anniversaries, birthdays, schedules, event, etc.) are shown in this report.

We've just fix a bug with our file uploader where sometimes when uploading multiple files or photos the upload would stall and never finish. This has been fixed — so no more waiting around wondering if the upload will ever finish!

A small improvement for librarians — you can now delete library item photos. Previously you could only replace them, or if you really wanted to delete them you had to delete the library item and recreate it, which, let's be honest, was a pain.

We've just updated the schedule page to filter entries by year instead of by month. Filtering by month was a little too granular, and practically it's more useful to see a schedule for an entire year than just for a month.

However, to keep things organized, we're still grouping entries by month within the year view, making it easy to still see all the entries for a specific month if you need to.

One nice benefit of this change is that you can now export all the entries for a specific year at once, which was previously not possible.

And, like before, when you first go to a schedule you'll only see upcoming entries by default.

The "Marriage status" filter in the families and people report builders now includes a "Widowed" option, allowing you to create reports that highlight the widows and widowers in your congregation.

Deacons, elders and pastors now have (read-only) access to the "Reports" section. Previously this part of the app was only available to administrators, statisticians and report managers. However, there are many really helpful reports for office-bearers in this section, including:

• Wards/Districts: A list of all shepherding groups in your church.
• Week overview: A list of birthdays, anniversaries, events, scheduled tasks and more for the current week.
• Special birthdays: A list of the special birthdays for the current year.
• Special anniversaries: A list of the special anniversaries for the current year.
• Deceased family: A list of sensitive dates pertaining to deceased family members.
• Families who cannot be emailed: A list of families who don't receive Church Social messages.
• Office-bearer terms: A list of all past and current office-bearer terms.

In addition to the default reports that are available in Church Social, office-bearers can also generate custom reports using the report builder. However, at least for now, only administrators, statisticians and report managers are able to save, edit, and delete custom reports.

The "Reports" page can be found in the "People" section of the app.

As part of this change, we've also moved the previous "Complete people backup" and "Complete family backup" reports to the "Manage" page, under the three-dot dropdown menu. There you'll find options to "Export people" and "Export families" as either CSV or Excel. This felt like a more appropriate place for these data exports, since they're not really reports.

The "Members" section of the app, which includes the family directory, map, and statistics, has been renamed to "People".

This is a change we've wanted to make for a really long time, as customers have found the "Members" naming confusing given that this section also includes regular guests/attendees. If you're using our native app you may have noticed that we've already been using this naming there.

One of the reasons we've held back on this change is because we already have a "People" section in the main app navigation. This is the area where administrators and statisticians manage all the people and families within the congregation. To solve this we've moved this page and the "Reports" page out of the main navigation and into the new "People" section. You can find these pages in that section under "Manage" and "Reports".

Architecturally this change feels better too. It's nice to have the management tools for families and people closely connected with the church directory. Previously these sections were quite "far apart".

The permissions and access to these pages has not changed. The "Manage" page is still only available to administrators and statisticians, and the "Reports" page is only available to administrators, statisticians and report managers.

While a relatively small tweak from a technical perspective, we appreciate that there's a lot of muscle-memory that's been built-up over the years, and in that sense this change may be slightly disruptive. Our apologies for that ahead of time.

Treasurers can now reassign contributions to people or other donors when deleting donors. Previously you couldn't delete a donor record if they had any contributions assigned to them.

This is helpful in situations where someone made donations to your church prior to being a member, and then later became a member. This feature effectively allows you to merge a donor record with a person record.

You can also assign contributions to another donor when deleting a donor. This is useful when you have duplicate donor entries and want to merge the two donor records.

Note that any previously issued tax receipts for reassigned contributions will now be associated with the new person or donor, so never reassign contributions to an entirely different person or business. This feature is only intended for merging duplicate contributor records — for example merging a donor with the name "Jane Smith" with a person with the name "Jane Smith", or merging two donor records for the same company name.

We made a small fix to the "Office-bearer terms" report this morning. Previously the "served" column wasn't rounding correctly, sometimes making it look like people served for almost a month less than they actually did. This has been corrected and the values in this column make a little more sense now.

We've updated the shepherding groups (sometimes called "wards" or "districts") filter in the family and people reports to include a "not in" option, which makes it easy to find members of your church who are not in specific groups.

A good use-case for this is if your church has separate elder and deacon shepherding groups, and you want to find any members of your church who are not in any deacon shepherding groups or in any elder shepherding groups.