Product Updates | Church360° Members Blog

Anyone in ministry knows how important is to visit with church members who are sick, homebound, lonely, going through a life change, or simply need someone to talk to. With the enhanced Pastoral Visits view in Church360° Members, these visits are easier to organize and manage. 

Church360° Members has recently undergone some updates that simplify the attendance entry process! Read on to learn more about recording event attendance (and recording it on a mobile device too!). 

A new way to navigate Church360° Members is now available! This blog will outline what this looks like, what its benefits are, and how you can try it out. 

We are pleased to announce an upcoming update to our integration with Vanco! This will allow users to import additional information regarding offering dates and fees into Church360°.

We at Concordia Technology Solutions value giving churches a high level of quality software as well as implementing the highest grade of security for each congregation’s data. For this reason, we’ve made some upgrades to increase account security. 

The following has been adapted from the Introducing Church360° Members: The Communication Module Webinar. Watch the video below to see the whole webinar.

Technology might not be the first thing that comes to mind with the words “pastoral care.” Yet, the resources of technology can truly aid pastors as they provide spiritual care for their community on the go, away from the physical church office. The Church360° Members mobile browser version is one such resource. In the mobile version of the software, you’ll find features that support the work at the very heart of tending to the flock you’re called to serve. 

Strong communication is an essential piece to ministry. It’s through communication that churches can help their congregants engage with their church body, resulting in spiritual flourishing and growth.

That’s why our team at Concordia Technology Solutions developed a suite of communication tools inside Church360° Members. The Communication Module is an upgraded voice messaging system built to keep your church connected in a more efficient and meaningful way. This module features improved list-building capabilities, longer voice messages, and a robust reporting system for all your church communications!  

The Concordia Technology Solutions team is happy to announce several updates to Church360° Members. These updates come directly from receiving and reviewing customer feedback. The overall strategy is to make sure the user interface is consistent throughout the software. The underlying infrastructure of Church360° Members has been updated, which will, in turn, make maintenance and improvements easier and will allow for more growth opportunities in the future. Views are being rewritten, and we continue to add new features to help you in your ministry.

In an update that will position the software for further improvements, we have improved the Custom Fields management with several small changes, including moving it out of the General Settings page to a separate page within Church360° Members. 

Pastoral Visits have always been a useful tool for tracking actions that have occurred in the past. However, with the introduction of email notifications and reminders for scheduled visits, they can now be used for future actions.

Once you, as a Church360° Members user, have opted-in to receive notifications, you will receive an initial notification email upon being assigned to a pastoral visit, as well as a reminder email on the day the visit will occur.

The Concordia Technology Solutions team is excited to announce the release of texting to Church360° Members. This exciting new feature allows you to send mass text messages to the members of your church who have opted in to this form of communication. This feature is included free of charge with your current subscription.

We've made a slight change to the navigation of Church360° Members. Now, clicking on Attendance in the top navigation will direct you to the Attendance Detail Report view rather than Enter Attendance view. In order to get to the Enter Attendance view, you may simply click the button in the top left corner of that screen.

There are many small features of Church360° Members that are not used daily, but serve a very important purpose. Away addresses are one of those features. We've received feedback that our users like that feature, but there was something we could do to improve it. Today, I'm excited to announce the introduction of recurring away addresses.

We’re pleased to announce the release of two new features to Church360° Members: the ability to create Smart Groups based on offering type and a custom field type for website links.

Church360° Members has always prioritized showing the right information in the right place at the right time. One way to accomplish this is to filter out people who are no longer active in your church, and while this is often accomplished by utilizing smart groups, a more permanent solution has been requested. We have now added a way to hide people for good with the Archive People function.

Church360° Members offers the option of renumbering all offering envelopes at one time rather than individually. This mass update can be implemented immediately or scheduled for a later time. With some recent updates, the process has become easier than ever before.

Church360° Members now offers the option of limiting which people show on the anniversary calendar in the Events view. You can do this by selecting a specific Smart Group. All accounts have been updated to show only the “Members” Smart Group (people who are currently living members).

We hosted four training webinars for Church360° Members this month. All the videos are collected into this post to make it easy for you to watch any webinars you missed.

Church360° Members gives users the ability to import electronic offerings given through GivePlus from Vanco Payment Solutions. This integration not only saves your church staff time, but it also ensures complete accuracy in offering entry.

We often hear from customers that it would be helpful to see more information about people alongside offering and attendance information. Read below to see the improvements we’ve made to answer those requests!

You can create a custom field named “Elders”, add it to Household profiles, and use that field to select which elder has been assigned to each family. Here is how to do it.

Church360° Members allows you to create custom fields in Person and Household records.

Since we launched Church360° Members in 2012, one of our core goals for the software has been accessibility. We believe that you should have access to your church’s data wherever you are, because opportunities to provide care for the members of your congregation don’t often happen at your desk. That is why the team at Concordia Technology Solutions is excited to announce the release of the Church360° Members app. 

Since this blog was published, we have sunset the mobile app. Church360° Members will still be accessible on mobile devices through your mobile browser. This is due to advances in our software's security. 

Regular Attendees is a feature of Church360° Members in which an individual can be marked as frequently in attendance for a series of events. This feature was meant to be a time saver, but it has actually been more confusing than helpful for our users, and it is rarely used. For those reasons, we are going to remove this feature from the software.

Church360° Members gives you the option to quickly update custom fields and tags in bulk on the People tab.

Church360° Members gives you the ability to add photos to household profiles and person profiles. By using cropping, you can use the same photo for both profiles, focusing the photo on the entire household or only an individual member.

Through the use of Roles and Logins in Church360° Members, you are able to grant finely-grained permissions to anyone in your church who might need to access your member information. Combining Roles and Logins in the way you need allows you to give users access to just the right amount of information.

Within Church360° Members, you are able to add individual relationships in a person’s profile record, such as Child, Parent, Spouse, Guardian, Ward, Grandparent, Sibling, and Grandchild. These relationships can be added even if the person is not in the same household as other family members.

We’ve made an improvement to Church360° Members that corrects some confusion with reviewing attendance. Learn about the update and see an example below.

We’ve made three improvements to the Envelope and Household Profile parts of Church360° Members. Learn about the changes and see examples of them below.

With 2017 on the way, many churches are getting ready to distribute offering envelopes for the coming year. Our developers have been working on some helpful tools to assist you in the process of organizing and distributing envelopes during this time of transition.

Concordia Technology Solutions works with a number of partners to provide our customers with digital tools for ministry. One of those partners with whom we have worked for a number of years is Vanco Payment Solutions.

Vanco has a long history of providing electronic giving for churches and is the exclusive payment solutions provider for CTS. Their products integrate directly with Church360° Members, which makes it easy to track offerings given electronically. This not only saves church administrators a lot of time, but the integration has also been shown to increase giving.

This week we hosted two training webinars for Church360° Members. Watch the videos below to learn more about setting permission roles and entering offerings.

We have a variety of Church360° Members training webinars coming up in the month of September. Browse our topic selection from the list below and register for trainings that might interest you!

We've adjusted the layout in the Offerings view that supports Gifts In-Kind and makes the memo field easier to use.

We've added a Gift Range Breakdown Report that allows you to compare trends in your contributors' giving ranges over time.

Over on our CTS blog, Amanda Lansche recently shared with us some tips on How to Take Quality Photos for Your Church Directory. Once equipped with your quality photos, Church360° Members can assist you in completing the directory process by combining your photos with your member contact information.

We've release an update to the renumber envelopes feature and added affixed headers to the People view.

We've added photo & logo cropping! Use this feature to crop family photos in your household directory or extract individual photos from family photos.

On Thursday, July 28th, 2016, Peter Frank, Manager of Concordia Technology Solutions, hosted a training webinar on all the recent updates in Church360° Members in Q2 of 2016.

Church360° Members has some great tools to help you make sure that your church's email communications always reach the right audience. 

We've added Givers and Marriages modes to the People view! This update has also moved mailing label downloads from Envelopes to the Givers mode.

We've added a photo column for both individuals & households in the People view and added the option for landscape printing across all views. 

Grandparent and sibling relationships can be added from profiles and age is now displayed next to birthday.

We've modified the Church Directory to allow for different entry styles and grouping by custom fields. You can also choose to print one, grouped directory, or a separate directory for each custom field group.

We've added a Church Register where you can record Baptisms, Confirmations, Weddings, and Funerals in Church360° Members.

We've created household custom fields and added the ability to bulk update fields for individuals and households!

We've created a History section in household and individual profiles which provides you with a timeline of all notes and Pastoral visits to your members. You can also change an individual's membership status from within this new History section.

We've had a couple questions on how to create Sunday School rosters in Church360° Members. 

Follow this four-step guide to create Sunday School Attendance Sheets that can double as rosters for your church. If you haven't started using the Sunday School Grades feature in Church360° Members, you may want to review these articles on adding Sunday School Grades and editing individual profiles. Once you've added and assigned Sunday School grades for children at your church, you will be ready to create Sunday School rosters using the steps below.

In a few weeks, we'll be releasing some exciting updates to the Pastoral Visits feature in Church360° Members. To help you get ready, we'd like to answer some common questions and give you ideas on how to take full advantage of this feature.

We've improved the away address feature, added a day calendar view on mobile, and updated the directory export to include household email and phone number information. 

We’ve added an address trait that allows you to search within a mile radius of a given location, filter addresses by zip code, and find unlisted addresses.

We’ve made some major changes to emails, event calendars, and Smart Groups traits related to widows and widowers. 

We’ve given you more options to help you generate contribution statements and find envelope numbers.

We’ve added a variety of new updates to Smart Groups in Church360° Members. We hope that these added Smart Group features will help you to communicate with your congregation more efficiently and identify pastoral needs more clearly.

We’ve added a .docx export to Church360° Members! This update will make it easy to export and edit Church Directories, Attendance Sheets, Mailing Labels, and Events. 

We’ve added a new, searchable Event Log to Church360° Members so that you can see what other users have changed in individual, household, or event records. It even tracks changes made through Church360° Unite!

Peter Frank, Manager of Concordia Technology Solutions, hosted a training webinar on Thursday, January 7th, 2016 to talk about all the recent updates in Church360° Members.

We’ve added an automatically generated Annual Report to Church360° Members! This replaces the denominational report in Members.

See what's changed in Church360° Members! I hosted a how-to webinar on Thursday, October 8th, 2015 featuring two major updates.

Permission roles offer you more control when defining user access, and custom fields now let you capture and track information at a whole new level.

Earlier this week, we released several updates to Church360° Members, including a significant upgrade to permissions and an exciting new feature!

We’ve updated how the People view in Church360° Members is displayed when viewed on a mobile device.

Now you can quickly access contact information in the People view using your smartphone or tablet. It has been optimized on mobile devices to look like a list rather than a table. Simply scroll through to see names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails for everyone.

We’ve updated the layout of individual and household profiles in Church360° Members with a few minor changes.

Which day would you call the “start” of your worship week? The calendar on my wall shows Sunday on the far left and Saturday on the other side, but this doesn’t make sense when I’m entering information about the weekend’s worship services in Church360° Members. I want certain services grouped together!

To solve this problem, we added an option that allows you to customize how you define a week at your church.

New look, new feel, new features!

We're excited to announce a brand new look and feel for Church360° Members. This change will not only add visual consistency and improved usability, but it will also introduce some innovative features that will save you time by quickly giving you more information.

We've just released a new update to Church360° Members that will allow you to more quickly add people to your database. Designed to maximize speed by requiring as little information as possible, the New Person page now only requires First Name, Last Name, Sex, and Membership status (Middle Name is an optional field). It now also allows you to add multiple people in a family at one time.

We’ve recently made some significant changes to the Offering area of Church360° Members. We included a guide to walk you through the changes, but here is a complete overview.

With our latest updates and fix-its, you can now do the following:

• Delete single instances of a reoccurring event
• Add more household emails and phone numbers to the People view
• Include Federal ID number on Contribution Statements
• Enter offerings more quickly
• Use a preferred name to enter offering and attendance
• Enjoy easily-sorted offerings after entry
• Choose Select All/None categories in People, Household, and Calendars
• Add tags to people while in tabs other than the General tab
  

We’re excited about an additional feature added in 2013 that provides you with the ability to sort your bulk mailing list by zip code. This function will reduce your expenses at the post office right away!