Entering Family and Member Records
The guide below explains the fields within the Family and Member Records as well as best practices for building and maintaining your Family and Member Records in your database.
Below are some additional best practices for curating your database:
- Keep your database complete by adding new information directly as you receive it.
- Ensure all members of your team follow naming conventions and standardized internal processes for data entry and maintaining your database.
- For our "Diocesan Initiative" churches, who use the database in conjunction with your whole diocese, your diocese may have diocese-specific guidelines you should follow when maintaining your database. Please contact your diocese to learn about their ChMS guidelines.
- Limit users' access in the database, allowing them to only access the data relevant to their role on your staff. Granting broad access or access to too many users can negatively impact the quality of your data.
- Consider cleaning up parishioner data after doing a parish-wide mailing or sending a parish-wide email. (Our Email Exception Report can help as it produces a list of all the undeliverable, deferred, unsubscribed, and bounced emails being sent from your database.)
- Consistency is key in maintaining a healthy database. Log into the database frequently and make database maintenance part of your regular routine to ensure data cleanup doesn't become a massive task.
- Consider using the Member Portal function, saving the parish staff time by allowing parishioners to update their own contact information.
- Use Family Explorer and Member Explorer to spot-check your data occasionally. Add different columns to your view to look for empty address fields, invalid email addresses, etc.
- Review your data for duplicate Family and Member Records. Send merge requests to our Support Team at [email protected].
- When speaking with a parishioner take a look at the Family and Member Records. If those records are missing important data, take this opportunity to ask the parishioner for up-to-date information.
- Use the Family Tags and Groups functions to compile lists of families and members that you need to contact regularly. (e.g. Create a Family Tag for families who receive the bulletin by mail or a Group for the members in your weekly Bible study.)