Once you’ve set up Elvanto for Pastoral Care, all the infrastructure is ready to store your information.
Here’s two ways to quickly build up your records:
Forms
Forms are the easiest way to collect information from people in your church en masse. This method of gathering information is particularly useful for new custom fields.
When you set up a new custom field, send out a form for people to fill in with all the areas you’d like to keep a record of. Forms can automatically update people’s information so you won’t have to go through and manually enter all of this information yourself.
For example, if you’ve just set up a custom field for Spiritual Gifting, send out a form that includes a link to an online quiz and a question about what their Spiritual Gifting might be (according to the quiz).
Visit this page to learn more about making forms in Elvanto.
Notes
Notes are useful for storing information about people that isn’t anywhere else in the system. For example, you might want to record when a person is released from hospital, or any significant pastoral care issues.
Because notes are often of a private nature, they’re able to be locked down and categorized, as well as assigned and scheduled to be followed up by a specific person in the system.
Access Notes through a persons’ profile.
Note Categories
Note Categories allow you to sort notes, but more importantly, are a great way to manage security, because you can assign different access permissions to each category.
Learn more about categorizing notes at this link.
Private Notes
The option of private notes is particularly handy for notes that contain extra sensitive information – like any high-level pastoral care information or specific security needs. Private notes creates an extra level of restriction for your system – only people you specifically grant access to will be able to see them. We recommend minimizing how many people have access to these notes; for more general limits, use a note category.