Reporting, when used effectively, is a huge advantage to your church’s youth ministries. Here’s a few tips on how to report effectively.
Scheduling Reports
Reports, once set up, can be automatically emailed to people on a regular basis. To do so, simply find the report on the reports page, and click on the ’email’ link underneath the report title. This will then give you a variety of options about how frequently, at what time, and to whom you want the email sent.
For reports done on a regular basis, such as a birthdays report or an attendance report, we recommend scheduling the reports.
Custom Fields
Custom fields are extra bits of information that you think are good to collect. Allergies, for example, need to be set up as a custom field. You can read about how to set up a custom field at this link.
Custom fields can be set up in a variety of ways, depending on how many options there may be. Here’s a few examples of things that you might use a custom field for, and how to best set it up.
Media Permissions
Media Permissions, in most cases, is opt-in/opt-out. This is best done with a ‘Checkbox’ custom field. If the parents are happy for you to take pictures of, or otherwise record their youth, then they can check the box, and everyone knows that it’s permissible to take a photo of their child doing an activity.
Interests
You can set up interests in a variety of different ways, but the best way is to set up a ‘Drop Down (can select many)’ custom field. In this, you can list a multiple different areas – animals, sport, music, computer games, etc. – and the children could select as many as they are interested in. This can help you determine what to plan for your activities.
Special Requirements
Some youth have conditions that need special attention. And while you could just record the name of their condition, it’s often simpler just to record what needs to be done/avoided. To best do this, set up a ‘Text Field (multiple lines)’ custom field, and let the parents fill out their requirements.
This can also be used to facilitate injuries, such as concussion, which require the youth to not play sports, or run around for a period of time. Just make sure that you update the information when the youth is well again.
Sharing Reports
By default, a generated report is private – only its creator can view it. To send the report to other leaders, you have to share the report with them. You can do this when you generate the report, by clicking the ‘share’ button at the top right. Or you can also do this on the reports page, by clicking ‘sharing’ underneath the report title.