What's New (September 24)

Nikki Tremann

Happy fall equinox! Here's the latest in Blackbaud Church Management!

Child check-in

Labels

To help caregivers view important information about children in their classes, child check-in labels now have an have an updated look to make them easier to read from a distance and identify when children have special care notes on their check-in records. To catch the caregiver’s attention, Other notes is now Care notes on the label. For more information, see Label Printers and Barcode Scanners.

Note: For consistency, Medical information for check-in now appears as Care information throughout the program.

Children and chaperones

When adding a chaperone to a child or a child to a chaperone, you may find several people with similar names in the search results. To help you identify the one you need, address information now appears for each person who has an address on their constituent record. For more information, see Children and Child Check-in.

Class attendance

To manage or print check-in class attendance in another application, such as Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, you can export and download it as a comma-separated values (CSV) file. From Events, Check-in, under Attendance, select View classes. Under Check-in classes, select Export to download the file. The exported file includes all information from the filtered list of classes. For more information, see Check-in Attendance.

Rosters

From Events, Check-in, under Rosters, select View all to view a list of rosters with details about each including the total members and criteria used to build it. For more information, see Roster Details.

Volunteers

To help you keep your available volunteers list up-to-date, you can now mark a disengaged or unavailable volunteer as inactive, such as to retain their history with your church for later reference. You can also mark an inactive volunteer as active to re-engage them or if you marked them as inactive in error.

• To mark a volunteer as inactive, select Mark inactive on their volunteer record.

• To mark an inactive volunteer as active, select Reactivate on their volunteer record.

Tip: When you mark a volunteer as inactive, Inactive appears under their name on their record.

For more information, see Volunteer Records.

Events

To speed data entry, you can now use constituent lists you save in Lists, Constituents to add individuals and organizations as participants in Events. When you add participants from a list, such as congregants with children, you also select the participation level, invitation status, and registration status to apply to their records.

On an event record, under Participants, select Work with participants, and then select Add, Add from saved list. For more information, see Participants.

Configuration

Global settings

From Control Panel, Settings, admins can now configure global settings to best meet the needs of your church:

• Giving analysis: To ensure totals in lists and analysis match how your organization views giving from its donors, select Giving analysis and set up how to calculate giving totals throughout Blackbaud Church Management. For more information, see Giving Analysis Settings.

• Constituent records: To ensure the names of individuals appear consistently throughout the web view, such as on records and in lists, you can set how to display them. For more information, see Constituent Record Settings.

• Gift management: To configure how many times failed recurring gifts are retried, select Gift management and update. For more information see Gift Management Settings.

Required fields

To help ensure consistent data entry for new constituent and action records in web view, admins can now manage required fields from Control panel, Fields and tables. Admins can also view the list of fields available to require in web view and the type of records where they appear. To make a field required, select Edit from the menu and select Required?.

The fields you can currently require correspond to fields that appear when you add constituent and action records.

Constituent records for congregants:

• First name

• Title

• Addressee

• Salutation

• Gender

• Constituent codes

Note: The Last name field was already required by default in web view.

Action records:

• Type

• Status

• Assigned to

Note: This release focuses on fields you use to add new records to the database. In future releases, you'll be able to require additional fields and record types.

Supported fields currently marked as required in database view are now also required in web view. For example, if the First name field was previously required in database view, it's now required in web view. After this initial release, updates to required fields in database view are not reflected in web view.

For more information, see Fields and Tables.

Giving

To help you identify batches, you can now enter a custom batch number when you add a batch of gifts in the web view. From Gifts, Gift management, select Add, Add a batch of gifts. To assign a custom number to the batch, select Enter a specific batch number and enter a unique number. If you don’t select this option, a batch number is automatically assigned to the batch.

You can also enter a custom batch number when you edit batch details from an existing batch record.

Note: You can't edit batch numbers for approved batches.

For more information, see Gift Batches.