Stafftool Blog: Archive

Metrics Update

The response to the new dashboard metrics has been great, people seem really excited about being able to get a glimpse of how things are going so easily. And since people are so excited about it, I’ve already gotten a lot of good feedback and bug reports. I just pushed out an update that includes some tweaks and fixes based on this feedback: The chart now spans the last 6 months rather...

May 12th

2 tags

Dashboard Metrics Launched!

Attendance and Contribution metrics are now available on your dashboard for a quick look at how things are going on a weekly basis. At a glance you’ll be able to see if things are trending up or down, what happened this week, what you averaged last month, and what you’ve averaged this year. For a video overview, check it out on Vimeo. So get tracking, and let me know what you think!...

May 10th

“@stafftool This is great! Anyone who is in need of church database software...”

– Micca Burris (@KamosMom on Twitter) about the new dashboard metrics

May 10th

3 tags

Watch

The new Dashboard Metrics feature is just about finished. Here’s a quick screencast going over how it works and how you can get started with it once it’s live (probably this weekend).

May 9th

Apr 27th

Apr 1st

1 tag

People Archiving & Non-Destructive Deletion,...

This is a pretty exciting update. Archiving and Non-Destructive Deletion First, let’s start with archiving and non-destructive deletion. Up until now, whenever you deleted a person from your database, there’s always that little bit of hesitation. Yes, there is a popup that let’s you cancel out of the deletion if you clicked by mistake, but once you click yes, that person is...

Mar 14th

3 tags

New Feature - Easy Reply Links In Emailed Messages

This is a quick little feature, but I think it’ll have a big impact for some folks (like my church at MBCC). Up till now, when you receive an emailed message in your email client of choice, there’s been no easy way to reply to the message. At this time Stafftool doesn’t have the ability to accept incoming email, so if you reply to the message by email, it only goes to the person...

Mar 1st

1 tag

Coming Soon - Archiving and Non-destructive...

Something that users have asked for here and there is the ability to archive people… people who they don’t want to necessarily delete forever for historical purposes or the occasional lookup, but would rather not appear in their main people listing. For example, people who have moved to different cities or churches, are away at school, or are deceased. People have been working around...

Feb 28th

1 tag

Pledges Now Live!

Just a quick post… pledges went live early last week along with a few other enhancements to the contributions section, just haven’t been able to post about it yet. I’m hoping to do a quick little screencast going over the new stuff soon though, so stay tuned!

Feb 24th

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Feature Preview: Pledges

In my new role as Elder of Technology at MBCC we’ve been discussing new Stafftool features that would help make things easier for us moving forward. One of the first things that came up was fleshing out the contributions section, beginning with support for pledges. Everyone is facing an uncertain future with the economy the way it is, and churches are no different. Pledges help a church get...

Feb 9th

1 tag

Smart Groups Success!

ksc: dude, we had the best small group signups today!
ksc: all because of stafftool ￼:)
stafftool: woo!
ksc: 45 people signed up for groups!

Jan 26th

3 tags

New Church-wide Options Give You Even More Control

Just finished pushing out some new church-wide options that will give you greater control over some aspects of the site that users have requested the ability to tighten up a bit. First off is Contributions. Some churches have expressed the desire to internally use the contributions functionality, but not make it available to their congregation. This is now possible by unchecking the...

Jan 24th

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New Smart Group Rule - NOT In a Group

@ksc had mentioned that he needed to gather up all the people in his congregation who weren’t part of a Life Group so he could send them a message to encourage them to become involved. Stafftool’s Smart Groups offer a way to track people who are already part of groups, but not the opposite, so I set out to make this possible… Now, you can choose a “who are not members...

Jan 23rd

1 tag

Robustified Exports

Up ‘til now exports were done in real time when you clicked on an export link. This usually worked fine… unless you had a lot of records in your database. If you did, then there was a good chance that the whole process would just time out your browser and throw an error (as well as wreak havoc on the backend server). Obviously, something needed to be done… Now when you...

Jan 23rd

3 tags

More Flexible Smart Groups

Ever wanted to have a dynamic group of people who are in either one group or another? Or a group of people who are tagged with “guitar” OR “drums”? Well, now you can. Just choose “any” from that drop down and the Smart Group will find everyone who matches any of your rules. Or, choose the default “all” and it will work like it has up until now,...

Jan 18th

2 tags

Groups - Now WAY Faster

If you are a heavy user of Groups and Smart Groups, you have probably noticed that going to the Groups tab got pretty slow once you had a lot of stuff in there. Binnerri, one of our very first and most active users, had so many groups and smart groups that their page was taking around 6 seconds to load… not good. So, after some work last night (essentially backporting the work I’ve...

Jan 16th

1 tag

A Quick Update

It’s been a while since there’s been a post to the blog here, so I thought I’d give a quick update on where things are with Stafftool and what’s in store for future versions of the app. First off, there have been a few tweaks to existing features of Stafftool, some additions both small and larger, and a lot of work done on the backend that’s not necessarily visible...

Sep 30th

2 tags

Watch

Keyboard Navigation If you aren’t already using Stafftool’s extensive keyboard navigation, learn about it here to become a power user.

Jun 9th

Watch

Stafftool As a Menubar App The latest versions of Fluid.app combined with Stafftool’s iPhone version let you have your information available directly from your Mac’s menu bar.

Jun 9th

Watch

Intro to Contribution Tracking Going to be trying out some new minute and a half screencasts to quickly go over different Stafftool features, starting with the new contributions section. More screencasts on the way!

Jun 9th

2 tags

First Pass at Attendance Tracking

Something I’ve been planning for a long time is the ability to track attendance for events. Just basic head counts collected over time. Every Sunday at church I see a volunteer in the back, pen in hand, counting each person and writing the tally down. Perhaps it gets put into a spreadsheet, perhaps just written down in a book. Either way it’s nice information to have and I thought...

Mar 15th

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Announcing Stafftool.app (well, kind of...)

Stafftool, being a web-based application, of course runs in your web browser with nothing special to install or keep updated on your computer or servers. In fact, that’s one of the best parts of using web apps. However, there’s a certain appeal to having a specialized program on your computer for some things…it makes it feel a bit more “real” to see a program...

Mar 9th

1 tag

New Features - Improved Searching and Event...

Just pushed out a couple really cool features. First up - Improved Searching. You can now search in the iPhone version. Need to look up someone’s info really quickly but don’t know their last name or don’t want to go through a few pages of contacts? Just search! Simply click on the search icon and a search form will appear. Just type in what you’re looking for and...

Mar 1st

2 tags

Limited Profiles Now Available

A few churches have requested the ability to have finer controls over the contents of public profiles, such as the ability to only show a person’s email address, but not their phone number. This is common when a person wants to be listed in the public directory, but doesn’t necessarily want all of their info to be made available, just a minimal set so other people know they’re...

Feb 21st

3 tags

Stafftool As an (Almost) Native iPhone App

Just a quick little post to let you know that the latest iPhone and iPod Touch update lets you save websites directly to your home springboard screen with its own icon. So, Stafftool now has its own custom icon when you save it. To try it do the following: Make sure your iPhone or iPod Touch is updated to version 1.1.3 Go to your Stafftool (http://yoursubdomain.stafftool.com) in Mobile...

Jan 17th

2 tags

Forget Typing - Import Your People Instead

When you first start with a new Stafftool account, you’re faced with a somewhat daunting task — filling it up. The main obstacle is filling up the people section with all the people involved with your organization - staff members, congregation, visitors, etc. You probably already have some of these people entered into some sort of existing system, such as your own personal Mac Address Book...

Dec 26th

2 tags

Your Church In Your Pocket

One of the things I’m most proud of with Stafftool is the iPhone version. I’ve even had a beta tester say he may end up using it more than the normal web interface. As an iPhone user, I’m always really happy to find a version of a tool that I already use that works really well on it, so I naturally wanted to provide one myself with Stafftool. A few of my favorite web apps are the...

Dec 20th

2 tags

Family Households!

This one’s been a long time coming and I’m really excited to introduce it…as we all know, family is a huge part of church life, and keeping track of those family units can be difficult. Up until now, Stafftool has made it easy to specify who’s related to who, but there hasn’t been a way to group those relationships together…until now. Check this box for them...

Dec 14th

3 tags

Smart Groups and Communication

I just recently pushed out a few exciting features for Stafftool centered around people and communicating with them. First is the introduction of Smart Groups. If you’ve ever used iTunes and created a smart playlist (all songs i’ve added within the last 2 weeks, all songs I’ve rated 4 stars or higher, etc) you’ve got the idea. You can now create virtual groups of people...

Nov 29th

Improvements to People

I just pushed out a new release that added some pretty cool stuff to the People section. There’s now an always-available letter directory bar that lets you filter the users by the first letter of their last name, like an old school rolodex. Also, there’s a new side button available - Export. Click that and you can choose to export the current listing of people in either CSV, vCard or...

Oct 24th

1 tag

Improvements to People Section

I just pushed out a new release that added some pretty cool stuff to the People section. There’s now an always-available letter directory bar that lets you filter the users by the first letter of their last name, like an old school rolodex. Also, there’s a new side button available - Export. Click that and you can choose to export the current listing of people in either CSV, vCard or...

Oct 23rd

Oct 7th

1 tag

So, what is Stafftool all about?

I’ve been working on Stafftool for a long while now and am deeply familiar with it, so I often take for granted just what Stafftool is and what I’m trying to accomplish with it. So, I’ll try to lay that all out as best as I can here. Stafftool started out when I realized that my church had basically no internal system for keeping track of everything they were doing. Being a Mac...

Oct 6th