Now that your key users are on board, it’s time to prepare to release to the rest of your church. You’re going to do great!
The next stage is identifying what type of people will be logging in and using Elvanto. These people might be volunteers serving at your weekly services, group leaders, children’s team and more.
Focusing on and releasing to one group of people at a time might be a good way to go about the release. This way you can focus on training the type of person based on what they’ll be using in the system, rather than sharing a bunch of information not relevant to their role.
Before releasing to each group you’ll also to ensure that people are set up and ready to go. For example, volunteers should be assigned to departments and group leaders have been added as a leader in their group.
You want to make sure everything is ready so when your people login and start using Elvanto they have what they need and can do what they need to do straight away. This is key for a successful release!
Sending out login details
Prior to training, you might want to send out login details to everyone attending so they can jump in and have a quick look before training day.
It can be easier if you ask the leaders of each ministry or department in your church to identify and notify their people about logging into Elvanto.
Make sure that you assign access permissions to all those you wish to log in. You can do this using Mass Manage if it’s easier, or get your leaders to go through their people one by one and give them access to what they need.
Here’s a few things to consider when you go to give people access to your church’s Elvanto.
Who gets access?
Not everyone in your church needs to be able to login to Elvanto. You need to allow your volunteers and leaders to do so, but just about everyone else is optional.
If you greatly limit the amount of people you give access to, there’ll be fewer problems popping up in your system because fewer users means fewer user errors. Good thing is: you’ll iron these out the more you release to groups of people in your church.
Contacting People
Once you’ve assigned everyone correctly, all you need to do is email the key users you want to log into Elvanto. Here’s how to send login details in Elvanto.
Within the email share all the great things about Elvanto and add the following placeholder:
%login_url%
This magic little placeholder will generate a unique code for each individual user that is valid for two weeks. When they click the link it will ask for them to supply a username and password. Once they set this, it saves to the database and they now have a login!
Some churches might prefer to set a username and password for each of their people which is also fine. It just might be a bit slower ;)
Do you need a “dry run”?
The answer to this question is almost always ‘yes’. A “dry run” is a short time where only a few people have access to the system. “Dry runs” can just be a small group of people, or one particular ministry that you bring in to the system to see if they have any difficulties. Try to choose a group that’s enthusiastic and likely to use a variety of features. Having a “dry run” before letting everyone into your system will help smooth out some obstacles, without 150 emails from people who can’t find the calendar.
Training
Some simple training can get your users past the first overwhelming part of using new software.
For example, you may want to gather your group leaders together for a demo night of managing their groups, submitting attendance and explaining what’s required of them. Do it on a big screen so all can see and maybe even have some computers set up for them to have a try.
If you have band practice, this could also be a great place to demo out Elvanto to your team of volunteers and get them comfortable with the system.
The same goes with any other team in your church. Training them on what they need to know to use the system and nothing else keeps thing simple.