Picture this: one of your church members shuffles to the mailbox on her birthday. Maybe she’s feeling a little sad or spread too thin. She finds a card from the insurance guy, a real estate agent, and one that’s really special—from your church!
Or think about a recent visitor. He’s been looking for a new church home but not felt truly welcome yet. But after visiting your church (online or in person), he’s surprised by a friendly email from you the very next day.
Moments like that matter—and you can make them happen more easily with church management reports built to help you make connections.
Do these five key things with your church reports starting today.
1. Send a warm welcome.
When you add someone to your church management system, mark them as a visitor or add them to a visitor’s list. Include the date of their first visit, too.
Each Monday, send a welcome to those who visited the previous day. At the two-week mark, send something physical, like a postcard and/or small gift, to let them know you’re still thinking about them.
(For more on visitor follow-up, check out this post.)
If you’re using Faithlife Equip, it’s simple to send a welcome email to new visitors. Here’s how.
2. Invite the right people to the right things.
Churches have announcements for parents, for seniors, for the youth group, for children’s ministry volunteers, and the list goes on. If everyone gets invited to everything, they can start to tune out . . . and accidentally miss out on something just because they didn’t catch that it was happening.
To combat this all-too-common problem:
- Pull a report of only the people you want to invite to an event or group.
- Send announcement and reminder emails/texts only to those people.
3. Plan for facilities & resources.
“How many chairs can we fit in that room, again?” Eliminate the need for questions like that (or endless spreadsheets) by creating a report that gives important info about your facilities—like ideal capacity and max capacity.
Reports can also help you plan facilities in situations like “graduation Sunday,” where children move up to the next Sunday school class on a specific day rather than right after their birthdays. With reports, you can find all your six-year-olds with a click. Instantly know how many will be “graduating” to the next class so you can more easily account for the right number of chairs, volunteers, and animal crackers.
If you have Faithlife Equip, you can use it to schedule your facilities and resources so they’re never double-booked. Here’s how.
4. Show gratitude.
Note “volunteer” in all the records of members who volunteer, like through using a custom tag.
Create a report of all volunteers, and start saying thank-you. How you do that is up to you!
Here’s one idea: let your entire leadership team in on saying thanks by using an online group greeting card service (e.g., groupgreeting.com, ellacard.com, kudoboard.com).
5. Engage.
Pull reports of people with birthdays in the upcoming month and do something for them. Maybe it’s a card. Maybe it’s a gift card. Maybe it’s “just” a text. But it all shows that you care.
You could do the same for these occasions:
- Wedding anniversaries
- Bereavement anniversaries
- High school and college graduations
You could even systematically send a “just because” note to each person in your church by pulling groups one at a time.
Here’s how to build custom reports with Faithlife Equip.
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Already taking these steps at your church? Fantastic!
Could you be doing them more quickly and easily?
Faithlife Equip helps you shave off hours and avoid the headache of manual updates, and until April 12, it’s still in early access for as low as $125 per month.
It’s simple to generate nearly any type of report for individuals, families, or facilities.
Get in on Equip’s ultra-low special pricing right now before the price goes up! We’ll keep making improvements and adding features—and you’ll get access to all of them.
The post 5 Spectacular Ways to Use Your Church Management Reports appeared first on The Faithlife Blog.
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