Tags give you a flexible way to identify groups of people in your church or conference. However, tagging people in eAdventist to create those groups has been a bit tedious. You could only tag one … person … at … a … time. The waiting is over and you can now add people to tags (and committees) so easily you’ll probably want to do it just for fun.

On Person Search and Advanced Search, the results list has checkboxes beside the names. As soon as you check one of them (1), a tool bar will appear (2) with the option to choose a tag or committee for the selected people.

Choose a tag …

… and it’s done. eAdventist lets you know what happened with each selected person. Green = “added”. Yellow = “already added before”. Red = “couldn’t add”. Hover over any of the indicators to see an explanation.

You probably thought that eAdventist was just for clerks. That is where we started but we’ve been growing eAdventist to help pastors and churches, too. Here’s a quick summary of several new tools designed specifically to help you.

Tags

Create “tags” to track small groups, spiritual gifts, Bible study requests, visitation lists and other groups in a way that’s fast and flexible. Use your tags to select people, create mailing labels, or send email messages.

Photos

Membership records come to life when you add photos of individual members and entire families. Use family photos to create a pictorial church directory.

Church Directory

In addition to the family pictures, eAdventist makes it easy to print a current, up-to-date directory whenever you need one. Include mobile phone numbers and email addresses for the adults, if you choose to.

Attendance

Capture a valuable indicator of church health and growth by recording attendance. eAdventist makes it easy to start by recording attendance counts for each service or event.

Mailing Lists

Create a church mailing list (email, that is) and use it to send your church newsletter, pastor’s letter, small group invitations, church calendar or announcements. Get your message out quickly and avoid spam folders.

Member Maps

We just added “People Map” (in the Explore section) to help you create a map of members. Use it to plan visitation, outreach events and more.

Graphs

The Explore section (under Reports) offers charts and graphs of members and baptism – by gender, by age. Explore the makeup of your church now and through time.

Pastor Notes

Now you can use eAdventist to record pastoral notes that are available to the pastoral staff – and only the pastoral staff – in your church. Track visits, needs and background that will help you serve your members safely and confidentially.

If you would like to know more about any of these features, we’ll be happy to help. Email us at help@eadventist.net.

Last month’s CALLED Ministerial Convention in Austin, TX was absolutely wonderful. It was a blessing to meet so many pastors and hear how they use eAdventist and what they would like eAdventist to do for them. We had an opportunity to share many of the new things we’re doing in eAdventist Membership to help churches and pastors such as member and family photos, church directories, mailing lists, tags, pastor’s notes and attendance among others. We heard requests to track weekly attendance on a person-by-person level, either with a lobby self check-in process or by letting someone check names off a list on an iPad. We also talked to pastors about setting reminders and exporting them to a calendar on their phone. A number of pastors would like a mobile app of eAdventist so they could look up or map their members while out visiting. All fantastic ideas that are on the eAdventist ToDo list!

One goal for eAdventist is to have it serve as a “Toyota Camry” of Church Management Software for churches. Towards this goal we have added the features listed above as well as others such as member logins so they can check/update their information as well as access church information like the directory that is not publicly available. We will never be a Cadillac or Ferrari, but if we can meet the major needs, and eliminate the need to maintain a separate software, it would greatly benefit the local churches.

One theme we picked up on as we talked to many pastors was the desire to get more involved in using eAdventist Membership to track members and other church activities, but a number of pastors feel they are kept at arm’s length because they cannot make any changes. If they are visiting a family they can’t even update a simple phone number, email address or marital status. We also had the opportunity to talk to a number of administrators from around the NAD at both the conference and union levels. The sentiment was unanimous that we want to give pastors the power to use eAdventist Membership as a Church Management tool. To achieve this we are making a change so that pastor’s can enter information in eAdventist. This will be just the basic information, all statistics and transfers still need to be entered by the clerk, but it will increase the value to everyone as the data becomes more complete and accurate and churches are able to use eAdventist for more of their church needs.

God bless,

eAdventist Team

You can now record attendance for your Church Service(s), Sabbath School and any other regularly occurring meeting such as vespers, prayer meetings etc, right in eAdventist!

UPDATE: Attendance has been added to the Pastor and Church Secretary roles in eAdventist.

Here’s how:

Set up Meetings (Note: “Weekly Church Service” and “Weekly Sabbath School” meetings have already been created for most churches to help get you started)

1. Click the “Attendance” option under the Organizations heading on the menu

2. Click the “Meetings” link to view the list of meetings

3. Click the “Add a meeting” button

4. Select the meeting type (Church Service, Sabbath School, Other). This allows you to enter each church services or Sabbath School class individually, but then summarize them all together as one number for each type in the report to the conference (coming soon!).

5. Enter the meeting description (Divine Worship, Early Service, 11am Service, SS – Earliteen, SS – Cradle Roll, SS – Balcony, Vespers etc)

6. Select the organization, for most users this will be your church

7. Click “Save”

When finished setting up each of the meetings you wish to track, click “Attendance” at the top of the Meetings page or in the menu on the left to go back to the Attendance page.

Record Attendance

1. Click the “Add attendance” button

2. Select the meeting you are recording attendance for

3. Enter the date the meeting occurred on

4. Enter the head count for the meeting

5. OPTIONAL: Enter the internet count for the meeting (those watching the sermon online etc)

6. Click “Save”

Attendance Report

First, notice that the quarter and year have automatically been assigned to each attendance entry based on the date of the meeting. It has also suggested that we add the Sabbath number for each attendance entry, which is something we’ll look into doing.

To view your attendance on a graph click the “Attendance Report” link on the Attendance screen.

Select the meetings you wish to appear on the graph, enter the start and stop dates (if desired) and click “Show” to view the graph. In this scenario we’re comparing the Early Service with the Late Service for June. Looks like more people are getting up early!

Our hope is that this will be a useful tool for the local church and not just an easier way of reporting to the conference. We’ve had several pastors tell us, “Who wouldn’t want to know what’s happening in their church every week?” The goal of this attendance feature is to make it easy it easy for the church to track these numbers and view them in a meaningful way on a graph.

God bless,

eAdventist Team

help@eAdventist.net