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 based on their characteristics such as marital status, age, tags, etc. Even better, they update in real time, so you never have to actually add people to them. Here’s an example of the smart group creation form:
It’s really easy, just name the smart group, choose some available attributes from the dropdown and choose or fill in the detail, and add as many as you’d like to be more fine grained. In this example, we’ll have a virtual group of all people who are married and under 30. You can then show all the people in your database who match these criteria and send them a message, export them to a CSV file to use in another program, or just get a better idea of who makes up your congregation.
Here’s a screenshot of some smart groups that were created by a pastor using Stafftool, so they’re real live, working smart groups:
As you can see, they’re all useful groups to keep tabs on, and really gives you a quick slice of your congregation with the people counts. This, being a church with lots of young people, has a large makeup of single, college aged folks. Any time an event is being planned for young single people, it will be a simple matter of sending a message to the singles smart group, or even creating a new one for single people under 30, if that’s the target group. All of these virtual groups, in addition the the “physical groups” such as ministries and staff groups, make it really easy to stay in communication with both actual ministries as well as specialized demographics. As you can see, it also helps keep on top of peoples’ upcoming birthdays!
The other improvement was to messaging, which received an internal overhaul. The main difference is that, while the previous version displayed all messages within the groups you belong to, the new version actually delivers individual messages to the recipients. This allows users to see if a message has already been read, as well as delete their copy of the message from their inbox.
Staff and the sender can also delete the original message, which will remove all the individually delivered copies as well. In the future, we’ll also be able to tell how many people have read the message, and even who, which will help with seeing how many people are reading your notifications.
Lots more cool stuff coming up on the road to launch, stay tuned!
2 years ago