If you read Adventist News Network’s recent article about Membership Software, you discovered that the General Conference will soon be offering a web-based membership application recently developed by the South American Division. This means that the world church will eventually enjoy many of the same benefits as eAdventist has provided to the churches in North America for the last 10 years.
eAdventist is designed to fit the needs of our division in a way that will be difficult to match in a world-focused application. We are currently working on several key features specifically for churches:
- tags (released 2011)
- Church Locator app for iPhone/iPad/Android (released March)
- church directories (released Sept)
- member photos (released Nov)
- visitors/interests
- additional languages (e.g. Spanish, French)
- personal accounts for members
eAdventist’s internal “plumbing” has recently been updated to enable many of these new features. Also, eAdventist will be getting a fresh new look — watch this blog for a preview. The GC Membership team is planning to establish links between the new software and the established membership applications – eAdventist and the South Pacific Division’s software (based on eAdventist) — to enable inter-division transfers.
The new GC software is not replacing eAdventist. Our team will continue to develop and support eAdventist for North America while the GC team begins to bring similar benefits to other divisions.
We look forward to serving you in 2013 and welcome the rest of the world to the benefits of web-based membership.
This is good news! I’m waiting for an eA app that allows clerks to login with mobile devices to manage membership (access to individual’s records, and ability to vote on transfers from smartphones or ipads). Any chance that’s in the works as well?
Yes, an app would definitely be useful for clerks. There are some other priorities ahead of it right now, so we don’t have an ETA yet.
I’ve accepted to serve as Church Clerk for the next two years. I’m praising God for the good that is being done to make the management of membership and information more readily available via technology.
Welcome to the clerk community. Our team feels blessed to be building tools that help you serve your church.
I’ve accepted the position as Church Clerk and have attended the Training. To be truthful, it all seems so overwhelming. Pray for me that I won’t allow the enemy to place doubts, in my heart. I want to do the Lord’s work
I am also a new clerk like Sharon and is tasked with cleaning up our membership list at the local church. We are currently using Excel, is there another software/program you recommend to assist us in Managing our list as we attempt to clean it up…outside of eAdventist.net, which we also use.
eAdventist is designed to make membership work as efficient as possible and it lets a team work together on the names. I would recommend entering all the names on your list into eAdventist as nonmembers and using it to manage your clean up.
Thanks for the prompt response!
Also, are we able to do a bulk upload to eAdventist, or do we have to enter each member individually?
Hey Brian! Ya’ll may wanna rethink the rum advertisements and bikinis that show up. Just saying.
Diane Reese, Pennsylvania Conference Clerk.
Yikes! WordPress doesn’t show ads to registered users, so we’ve never seen them. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We just upgraded to the “ad-free” option, so the rum and bikinis should be gone for good.
I am serving as clerk for for the first time and I am doing some cleaning up as well. As a matter of fact a whole lot to be done. I have a quick question. There are persons on the system who are deceased but showing as members in the system. I do not have a date of death. How do I enter these? Is there a special date that can be used e.g. the 01/01/1800 used for baptisms? Another question those deceased persons listed in the church book as members but are actually deceased, should I enter them in the system then delete them from the system as deceased? Thank you for your response.
Glad you asked before starting, Carline. Using “01/01/” for unknown dates and “1800” for unknown year are good ideas — just not together. The deceased information will be much more useful to you if you estimate the year (or decade, at least). The same applies to baptism dates.
The only good place to use “1800” for unknown year is in birth dates — you don’t know the date or the member prefers not to publish it.
Regarding deceased members who are not currently listed in eAdventist, it will probably only be valuable to you to enter (then decease) the most recent ones — within the last year. The most valuable thing is having your current members complete and up-to-date. That’s the information that your church and conference can use to serve them.
There are two websites I use to find the date of death of members who have not been active before they died.
http://sortedbyname.com
http://ssdmf.info
Thank you!
I however want to point out that at the last training we had in Orangeburg, we were advised to use the 01/01/1800 dates when updating members from the book to the system where we do not have baptismal dates. Please clarify this because I am in the process of cleaning up the books and I want to make sure that I am doing the right thing.
I have taken a test drive of the new system. It seems to work well on my MacBook Pro using Firefox.
I don’t see any fields for email addresses. Has there been any consideration for adding this field?
Thanks for your hard work.
If you are looking for email for a person, it’s in the left column below the name fields. If you are looking for email for an organization, click on the “Directory” tab.
Sure wish there was a place for a nickname or preferred first name. We have some members who are known by a nickname that has no relation to their legal name. If their legal name shows up on a church directory, nobody knows who it is. On the other hand we need to have their legal name in case they go missing in the future and we need it to find them using internet name search data bases.
You should see that this fall. Since “First name” is already wired into all the reports, labels and directories we will probably add a “Legal name” field that can be filled in when necessary.
Thank you for these links. We will add these to the the list in eAdventist.
I’m helping Pastor Robert Putt at the Umatilla SDA Church better organize the church. Does eAdventist software integrate with Google maps? I want to take the membership and visitor information and migrate it to Google maps so that we have a map of the locations of all members and visitors. By doing this, we want to be able to assign our Elders to territories closest to the Elder’s home. Please advise and thank you.
Terry, eAdventist uses Google Maps to display a member’s location but doesn’t currently show all members. We will be adding geocoding for members later this year (likely summer) but you can do this now if you geocode the addresses. I’ll email you an explanation of the how to get the data from eAdventist.