Switching software is a huge undertaking, you just received an email from the Tithely Move-In team letting you know that your Move-In is complete. Now what? Where do you begin with this new database, how do you ensure everything is correct, how do you organize your information? Tithely will only be as effective as the information is accurate, so it is important to clean up your data after move-in. This article will help you determine what your first steps should be!
Archive Records
When Moving Data into Tithely our team will rarely Archive People. Unless you explicitly ask for people to be archived, we would never want to make an assumption about who you would like to be archived from the system. However, after your data is moved into Tithely, you can, and will want to run a search of People to find those who may need to be archived from the database. Because each church or ministry is unique in the ways they track this, it may be searching for the status field of "no longer attends" and/or a field called "date of death".
Restructure Profile Fields:
If our complimentary data import services were used to move you into Tithely, you will probably have a section of profile fields called "Legacy Fields". These fields hold information that was unique to your previous software/database.
You may rename these fields or even move (drag and drop) them to other sections as you wish by going to Church Management Settings () > Profile Fields.
You may even decide that you no longer need a legacy field, or the data stored in that field. If this is the case you can simply delete the field (by clicking on it and selecting the X on the right-hand side). An example of this would be a legacy field of Beeper Numbers; more often than not these numbers are no longer being used.
As you are able to see all of your data in Tithely easily, you may realize that there are fields that can be combined to ensure your new database is as effective and efficient as possible. An example of this, you may have had a field called "Membership Status" and you now realize that you previously had too many options.
You may want to consolidate these options down. Maybe you want to use the "Status Field" with options of Member, Attender, Visitor, No Longer Attends, and merge the previous options you had into these. To ensure that you do not lose any of the information, we would recommend determining what the new status options are that you want to use, then going to people, filtering for each of the old profile field options and then updating multiple people with the new correct profile Status Field.
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You may also decide some of your legacy fields would be better used in Tithely as Tags, given the search logic or how you use this information. In this case, you can create a new corresponding Tag, and then bulk assign individuals with this profile field to that tag, from the People section. You would then be able to delete this profile field.
Organize Tags and Tag Folders:
If we moved your "groups" in they will appear in the Tags section. We realize that structurally, it may make more sense for some of these tags to be organized in Folders with other similar tags.
Tags are a great way to help you organize and communicate with people. Group people by Children's Ministry classrooms, Men's Ministry classrooms, small groups, and more. Give permissions to your ministry and group leaders empowering them to update class rosters in real-time adding or deleting people, handle group communication by email and text, print class directories, or visually map where participants are coming from all by utilizing tags!
Set Up Automations:
Automations were created to help streamline your processes. We believe that Automations have the power to make things easier, allowing you to accomplish "set it and forget it" tasks. This will allow you to automate those tasks that just take up your time, letting you focus on what really matters.
To Access Automations go to Church Management Settings () > Automations.
A few suggestions we have:
- Use Smart Tags to populate people into tags based on a profile field. This can work really well for children in classes based on grades. Or tagging all your members. Anytime someone new gets added to the database, if they match the parameters you put in place, they will automatically be added to the tag.
- Automate Sending Out Birthday Emails and never miss a member's birthday again!
- Create a follow up to trigger for the children's pastor to follow up with first-time visitors to the kid's ministry!
Review Contribution Information:
We want to ensure that the data we moved into Tithely was fully correct, especially your contribution records. We understand how important money is. Look over your Giving, run some reports to see if what is being reported in Tithely matches what you historically have stored in your account software.
Review Funds
Do you need to Create New Funds? Archive Old Funds? Make a fund non-tax deductible? Funds are the place to do these things.
Set Up Notifications You Would Like to Receive
Notifications in Tithely can be wonderful! You can tell Tithely to send the email attached to your user reminders of upcoming birthdays, anniversaries, new people added to the database, attendance reports, and giving overviews for the week.
We highly recommend setting up notifications that will be helpful to you in your role at the church! These are user-specific (and based on role permission)
To set up notifications:
- In the top right of the screen, click the My Organization icon (
).
- Click "Notifications" in the dropdown menu
- Select which notifications you would like to receive and what day of the week you would like to receive the notifications
- Click "Update"