Without a question, the biggest concern when congregations first switch to Church Social is the safety and privacy of their membership records. It can be uncomfortable moving records from their own control, often a file on their own computer, up to “the cloud”, some random computer somewhere in the world.

Of course, doing this has huge benefits to the church, which is why more and more churches are making this move. But it does require churches to ask the question: “Are our membership records safe?” Church records, after all, typically include a lot of personally identifiable information (PII).

In reality, even churches who keep their data offline are often much more online than they realize. For example, many church administrators backup their files to Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or Apple iCloud. Plus, emailing membership reports and data between church members and committees is common practice. As churches, we need to be aware of how this data is being used, and do our best to keep it safe.

Church Social takes our role in this process extremely serious. Which is why we’ve taken three key steps to ensure the ongoing safety of our customer’s data.

1. Ground-up application rewrite

The first step happened early last year when we completed a ground-up rewrite of Church Social. The previous iteration of the app was almost seven years old, and was built on dated technology. We wanted to start over, making security a priority at every layer of the application.

Church Social now uses a highly reputable, industry leading server-side web framework, called Laravel, which follows modern best security practices, especially when it comes to user authentication, authorization, session management, password hashing and encryption.

The benefits of using a popular framework like Laravel are enormous. It’s been installed millions of times, and is contributed to by thousands of developers around the world. This ultimately leads to a battle-hardened software platform that we can trust deeply to build our product on top of.

2. New hosting infrastructure

The next step was an improvement to our hosting infrastructure. There are two main attack vectors on any given website: the application, and the server it’s being hosted on. Both need to be rock solid in order for the entire system to be secure.

And, while our previous hosting provider was fantastic, their business model wasn’t right for us. They provided us with a barebones server, which we then had to maintain ourselves. That meant installing software, running security updates, managing backups, etc. It meant that we had to be both application security experts, and web hosting security experts at the same time. That was more responsibility than we felt comfortable with.

When the redesign was launched, our hosting was also moved to a new provider called Heroku. Besides being an industry leading hosting provider, known for hosting some of the Internet’s biggest brands, they also offered a whole extra level of service. Instead of simply providing us with a server that we were responsible for managing, Heroku manages the entire hosting infrastructure. They install software, they run updates, they deal with critical security vulnerabilities that arise, and handle backups.

Put simply, Heroku has allowed us to focus all our efforts on building Church Social, knowing that our web servers are safe with them.

If you’re interested in learning more about Heroku’s security practices, you can do so on their website, here.

3. Third-party security audit

The third step happened earlier this year, when we contracted the Digital Boundary Group, a web security firm located in London, Ontario to do a complete web application penetration test on Church Social. This is something we’ve wanted to do for quite some time but, frankly, is quite expensive. With thankfulness we were able to make this investment into the product in March.

We were pleased with the results of the audit, which found no critical vulnerabilities. Digital Boundary Group did make a number of recommendations, many of which we’ve already implemented. Put simply, Church Social has never been more secure.

Looking to the future, we intend to do more security audits, as technologies change, and as new features are added to the app. Web application security isn’t an item we can check off our list and be done with. Rather it’s become an integral part of our ongoing development process and business.

If you’d like to learn more specifics about our security practices, please visit our security page.

We're extremely excited to announce a huge update to the reporting features in Church Social. These changes really started all the way back when we launched the redesign early in 2018, but our grand vision for the reporting features wasn't fully complete until this week!

Before we go into any details, we invite you to watch this video, which provides a good high-level overview of the new features:

New default reports

The first thing you'll notice with the new reports page is a set of default reports. Church Social now comes with almost 20 default reports, and we suspect this will only grow. We've organized them into categories: membership reports, administrative reports, important date reports, backup reports, and custom reports.

Let me highlight a few of the default reports:

Ward lists

While the ward (or district) list reports are not new to Church Social, we have added a couple really handy print options. Now when you print a ward report, you can choose the orientation (portrait or landscape), as well as how many columns you'd like the wards displayed in. These two options allow you to nicely fine-tune the ward list reports for your particular congregation.

Families who cannot be emailed

The messaging tools in Church Social are great. They allow you to quickly email all the members of your congregation within seconds. This is especially helpful when there are cancellations or last minute notifications. For example, maybe a church service is cancelled due to poor weather. However, as handy as that is, there is always a challenge with families who do not receive messages from Church Social. Maybe these are older members, or simply members who do not have an account setup within the app. How do you notify them? That's where the new "Families who cannot be emailed" report becomes extremely helpful. This report lists all the families who do not receive Church Social messages, with their phone numbers, organized by ward.

Member activity reports

The new member activity reports might be our favourite addition to the new reporting features. These reports show all the activity within the congregation by year. This includes members who were born, baptized, did profession of faith, got married, joined the congregation, left the congregation, or passed away. This report will be especially helpful when putting together annual reports, or sharing statistics at an annual congregational meeting.

Deceased family report

An important aspect of being a good office bearer is being in-tune with the members under your care. This is especially true when it comes to members who have lost loved ones, which is why we've added a new "Deceased family" report. This report lists all deceased members who still have family within your congregation. This includes the deceased member's name, the date they passed away, their birth date, as well as their wedding anniversary date, if they were married.

Improved report builder

In addition to the default reports, we've also made some significant changes to the report builder. In fact, there are now two report builders: one for families, and one for people. The report builder has been completely redesigned, and it's now easier than ever to build custom reports.

Columns, filters and sorting

We've added a ton of new columns, filters and sorting options. It's also extremely easy to click on an existing filter and make changes to it. Each one of these has it's own set of options, which you can use to tailor your report. For example, when you choose the "age" column, you can specify whether you want the member's current age, or their age as of this year. We've worked really hard to provide as many different options as possible!

Grouping

One of our favourite features of the new report builder is the new "group by" options. When viewing large sets of data, grouping records together visually can go a long way to making the report easier to read. The grouping is also intelligent with how it handles columns that have multiple values. For example, if you group a family report by wards, and a specific family belongs to more than one ward, the report builder automatically repeats that family for each ward they belong to.

Saving reports

Yes, you can finally save reports! Administrators, we've heard you loud and clear on this. Whenever you generate a custom report, you have the option to save it to your custom reports list. Later, you can view that report, or even make further changes to it. When you make changes, you'll be given the choice to save those changes, or discard them.

Exporting and printing reports

Church Social makes it extremely easy to export your data out of Church Social. Whether it's one of the default reports, or a custom report, you can click the "options" button to download it as a CSV file (to be used in Excel), or you can print it, which will generate a print-ready PDF. In this update we also added the ability to specify the orientation of the PDF. You can choose either portrait or landscape, which can be really handy for reports with lots of columns.

Click to view a profile

One other small, but handy update to the reports is the ability to click on any row to view the profile for that person or family. This makes it really easy to make changes to members or families from a report. Take the new "Bouncing emails" report as an example. This report lists all the members in your congregation who have a failing email address. You can click on the member to view their profile, and then fix their email address!

I hope that gives you a good overview of the new reporting features. We're pretty excited about this update, to say the least! 😊 It is our hope that these new features will help simplify administrative tasks within your congregation, and also provide helpful support to the office bearers as they carry out their pastoral work.

Our bulk importer is an extremely helpful tool for new congregations first coming onto the platform. It allows them to import their existing membership records from other software, granted it can be provided in an Excel (CSV) format. However, since it's difficult to represent relationships in a flat spreadsheet format, it was never possible to import families or marriages. This has always been a nuisance, since it meant a bunch of work was still required after doing the member import. Administrators had to manually go through each member in their congregation, and group them into families, while also adding marriage information. We wanted this process to be easier, so last week we set out to improve it!

The people importer now has five new possible fields: family, marriage_status, marriage_start_date, marriage_end_date and ward. Meaning you can now automatically group members into families using the family field, setup marriages using the marriage_status, marriage_start_date and marriage_end_date fields, and as a bonus you can even set the family's ward (district) using the ward field. You can read more about how to use these new fields in our support article here.

A common task for church administrators (statisticians) is providing member information to new churches when a member moves away. This information typically accompanies an attestation document, and includes things like birth dates, baptism and profession of faith details, contact information, marriage dates, and the like. We wanted to help make the process of sharing this information easier, so we added a new "transfer documents" feature to Church Social.

Administrators can find the new transfer documents in the "People" section, once you've selected a user. You'll see a new "download transfer documents" option under the family tools drop-down menu. You can even select which family members are included in the report. This is helpful in situations where a only a child moves away.

As a member of the Canadian Reformed Church federation, much of the church terminology I'm familiar with has come from my federation. That has, naturally, had an impact on the language used in Church Social. For example, prior to the redesign, pastoral groups were always called "wards" in Church Social. In the redesign we added a setting to allow churches to choose between "ward" and "district", another common phrase for this. Today, we've added another terminology setting, this time for members who have done profession of faith.

Milestone status

It's quite common for congregations to use a member's milestones (baptism and profession of faith) as a type of membership status. If a member has been baptized, they are considered a "Baptized Member". If a member has also done profession of faith, they are then considered a "Professing Member". Well, sometimes. Different churches have different names for this status. Two other common terms are "Communicant Member" and "Confessing Member". To accommodate each congregation's language preference, we'd added a new "Name for members who've professed their faith" setting, found on the church settings page.

We've gone ahead and set this setting to what we believe each church will prefer. You can, of course, adjust it as needed. You will notice that this setting is now respected throughout the app, including on the family and statistics pages, and is also available as a new field (milestone status) in the report builder.

Updated statistics

Related to this change, we've also made some updates to the statistics page. First, you will notice that we're using the church's preferred terminology here for members who have done profession of faith. We've also completely removed the "non-professing" term, and are simply using "baptized" here instead.

We've also made a change to how the statistics are calculated. Previously, it was possible to set both the "was baptized" and "did profession" options as empty (unknown). And while this technically was more flexible, in reality it made things more confusing. A number of congregations didn't understand why their "professing members" and "baptized members" statistics did not add up to the "total members" count. This was simply because they had members with these fields set to empty (unknown). We've completely removed the ability to leave these fields empty, which should help clear things up.

It's worthwhile to note that if you have a member who has done profession of faith, but has not been baptized, the system will still consider them a "Professing Member". Also, if you have a member who has not been baptized, and has not done profession of faith, they will be listed on the statistics page under a new "total non-baptized members" statistic.

One great feature of the sermon archive in Church Social is the ability to have multiple formats per sermon. Churches can add both video and audio versions. They can even set some as public (to be displayed on their website), and some as private (only available to members in the app). And, as of today, we've added a third format, PDF documents!

How to

To add a PDF document to a sermon, simply add a new media format like you would with video embeds or audio files, and then click on the "Document" tab. From there you can select a PDF file to upload.

Screenshot of adding a PDF document sermon format

Benefits

Sharing a text version of sermons can be beneficial for a number of reasons:

• People may prefer reading a sermon to watching or listening.
• Text versions can be printed, where audio and video cannot.
• You can copy and paste text from a PDF, useful for sharing quotations in bible studies and other situations.
• PDF files are much smaller in size, making them more accessible on poor Internet connections.

WordPress update required

This new feature required some changes in our Church Social WordPress plugin. Be sure to update the plugin within your WordPress control panel to take advantage of this new format!

This week we have a bunch of small updates we wanted to share with you, and decided a summary blog post would be the best way to do that. We've made improvements to the messaging tools, family names, and have added more printable content to the app.

Multiple file attachments in messages

You can now add multiple file attachments to messages again! We had removed this functionality in the redesign in an attempt to simplify the new message form, but we've heard you loud and clear—you want the ability to do this! Keep in mind that the combined file size for all attachments can only be 8MB.

See recipients in message emails

One thing that wasn't immediately obvious when receiving an email from Church Social is who the message was all sent to. Was it sent to everyone, or a group, or maybe only a few people? To find out, you had to log into the app and view the message there to see the recipients list. To make this more clear, we've added a recipients description to the top of all message notification emails.

Family name improvements

We've made two small, but important changes related to family names. First, previously, when viewing a widow in the member directory, the widow's maiden name was not visible. This is because we only showed the maiden name for families with active marriages. However, in situations where a woman has lost her husband, it makes a lot of sense to still show this information, and so we've added that in.

The second change is a little more subtle. One really great feature of Church Social is it's ability to automatically generate family names for you. We do this by looking at the primary family member name, the spouse's name, their membership status (they must be an active member to appear in the member directory), as well as their privacy settings. Pulling this all together, we can determine an appropriate family name. However, there has always been a bit of a glitch with non-member families. Since they don't have active memberships, it only ever showed the primary family member's name. Now this wasn't a big deal, since these families only show up in reports. However, we wanted to fix this. Now, when we generate family names for non-member families, we simply ignore their membership status and privacy settings (since this information is only ever available to administrators).

Council family cards

Some congregations maintain a printed version of the member directory specifically for office bearers. This includes extra information, such as the ward (district), birth dates, marriage dates, baptism and profession of faith information, membership status, in addition to the family's contact information. These council family cards can now be generated directly in Church Social from the council section. To do this, find a family member in the "member close-up" tool, and click the "download family card" button.

Printable member directory card view

We recently had a request from the Aldergrove Canadian Reformed Church where they wanted to print the card view of the member directory. This view includes just the family photo and their names. They include this with their church's welcome package for new members. We thought this was a neat idea, so we added the ability to generate a print ready version of this right from the member directory. Just click the "more" button, and then click "download print version".

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.