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 a feel for what the next year is going to look like financially and plan accordingly.
So, pledge support is coming soon. It’s really easy - every person’s record can have pledge records added as seen above… pledges are based on a yearly cycle, and can be set as a certain amount every week, 4 weeks, or year, and Stafftool will do the rest.
The above form, where the person pledged to give $500 every 4 weeks during 2009, looks like this when you view their contributions tab. As you can see, the total yearly pledge is calculated, and the person’s progress toward meeting that pledge is shown. Simple.
As I said, this feature is still being worked out, but this initial functionality is almost ready to go. The next post will be a preview of another feature that will help make getting these pledges set up even easier - automatic information update requests for everyone in your organization. Even if they don’t have a Stafftool account set up, as long as you have their email address you’ll be able to send them a request to keep their information up to date, including their pledge. Stay tuned!
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 “Allow non-admin users to view their own contributions” checkbox. Once this is unchecked, only admin users with Contributions permission will be able to access the Contributions tab.
Next up is Birthdays. Most churches enjoy having the ability to track peoples’ birthdays, but sometimes all those birthdays can overwhelm your calendar, especially if you have a lot of people in your database… you can now uncheck the “Show birthdays in the main calendar” checkbox if you’d like to have Birthdays off by default in your calendar. There is a new “Show birthdays” or “Hide birthdays” button on the side that will toggle showing birthdays according to the site-wide option, so you can easily (and temporarily) show them or hide them whenever you need… perfect for quickly seeing this month’s birthdays, for example. Also, birthdays will still appear in peoples’ individual info cards.
Finally, Ages. Automatically showing peoples’ age if they provide their birth year is a very convenient and slick feature… however, some people are sensitive about their age or your church may simply not want to provide ages to everyone. By unchecking the “Show ages with birthdays to non-admin users” checkbox, only admin users will be able to see peoples’ calculated ages and birth years.
Since these are new options, they are all on by default, to maintain previous behavior. If any of these are tweaks you’ve been itching for, just click your Account Settings link (available to the account owner) and scratch that itch!
@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 of…” Smart Group rule and then choose the Group that you are interested in. One thing to keep in mind - the rule includes all members of the group, including any child groups, even if they’re not explicitly added to the parent group. So, for instance, if you have a “Home Groups” parent group with child groups within it for every individual home group, you can simply choose the parent “Home Groups” group to get everyone. Here’s a simple sample Smart Group that would gather everyone not in a home group and who’s not tagged as out of town, since you wouldn’t want to contact them for frequent local involvement like a home group:
This opens up a lot of possibilities for finding and communicating with people who aren’t currently involved that you’d to be.
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 export more than one record the exporting is queued in the background on the server, so it can take the time it needs to get the export generated without being at the mercy of the browser’s timeout. Then, when it’s complete, it securely uploads the file to Amazon S3 and provides you with a private link to download the file. It will also email you with the link when the job is complete. Finally, there is a new Exports page (your.stafftool.com/exports) where you will have access to all the exports you’ve created in the past so you can easily access them whenever you need. This should make retrieving your information from Stafftool much more reliable.
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, finding everyone who matches all of the rules. Things just got a lot more flexible!
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 done for the next big release to the existing codebase) it’s now dramatically faster. For example, Binnerri’s page went from more than 6 seconds to load to pretty much less than 1 second. So now, one of Stafftool’s most useful features is even more useful.
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 to users (but which make the future development of the app more solid).
Contributions
Let’s start with the most obvious addition that hasn’t been blogged about yet - Contributions. Currently in a somewhat “beta” form, the Contributions section represents a large piece of functionality that had been planned from the very beginning, but was re-prioritized down a bit upon the initial launch. After the main features were solidified, the Contributions portion was tackled.
In its current incarnation, it enables your organization to easily and quickly enter in contributions from individual people as well as grand totals for events if you prefer to enter in lump sums. You can tag contributions to organize them into different funds, and you can see at a glance what your grand and YTD totals are, giving trends and fund breakdowns. You can view contributions on people and event info cards, and people from your organization can see their individual giving when they log in. Here’s a quick screencast that shows the main section in action:
A more recent addition is a CSV export so you can bring it into your spreadsheet and do some further number crunching. There are some more things planned for the future, and we hope to have to finalized and taken out of it’s beta phase in time for a more widespread adoption for the new year.
Smaller Feature Additions
OpenID Login - you can now use OpenID to log into your account. To set it up, simply edit your profile and click the Use OpenID link next to your login name and fill in your OpenID URL and update.
Then, next time you log in, click the login with OpenID link, enter your OpenID URL and authenticate at your OpenID provider to enter your account. That’s all there is to it!
iCal Subscriptions - You can now subscribe to your personal calendar of events with iCal (or Outlook 2007 or any other app that supports iCal feed subscriptions) by clicking the Subscribe to this calendar button in the events section. It includes a special authentication token so that you can receive your private events on your desktop app just like you would see them within Stafftool.
As I said, there are a lot of things that are currently being worked on that will be coming out in future releases. Some will be coming out as individual feature updates, and some will be part of the larger version upgrade.
One feature that is planned to be released in the near term is recurring event exceptions. This is something that has been wanted for a long time, but proved to be a tricky problem… thankfully, it’s going to soon be a reality. You’ll be given the option to delete an individual occurrence of a repeating event, as well as update an individual date with new information. There are a few more tweaks to finalize with it, but it’s almost here.
Another enhancement being worked on is a more compact tabbed entry and editing interface. Currently in Stafftool, the entry and editing forms can get to be pretty long. Sometimes you just want to enter some general information and that’s it, so you enter the first few fields and then scroll past all the fields you don’t need to submit the form. The tabbed interface will make the firm much more compact and have all the basic fields on the first tab so you can enter quickly. Here’s a preview of how it’s looking.
As you can see, everything is now organized into logical tabs, cleaning things up a lot.
More to Come
There are more things in the works that I’ll be posting about in the future. Apologies for seemingly disappearing for while… I hope to get back into the swing of things with the blog here, and I look forward to hearing from you all!
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.
2 years ago
