TIP – Tags for disbanded churches

Here is a great idea for using “tags” that comes from Carol Sirpless, clerk for Iowa-Missourri Conference. We asked if we could share it with you.

Because we found it to be a pain to keep switching the disbanded churches from inactive to active in order to be able to process a transfer and then remember to switch it back to inactive, and since technically, those members are members of the conference church anyway and their transfers need to be voted by the conf committee, once TAGS became available, we transferred all those people into the conference church records and created a tag for each disbanded org.  So for example we have tags:

We can now look up in each person’s record to see if there is a tag showing where they were prior to being moved to the conf church and we can search for all the names as a group for any specific disbanded church.

It makes the stats correct with regard to membership count within the conf church (since the members are no longer dispersed among disbanded churches).  The Statistical Recap doesn’t list all those disbanded churches either, cleaning up that report.

When we did this in 2012, I wondered if anything would come up later (hindsight being 20/20) that would make me regret moving these folks’ records from the disbanded churches to the conf church and if tags would be adequate, but in the year since, it has been ALL GOOD.  I highly recommend it for all conferences.