Email is a critical component of Church Social. We send thousands of emails every day, and tens of thousands every month. These emails include messages sent to members using the emailer, schedule reminder emails, welcome emails, password reset emails, and more. Our users rely on these emails, and it's important to us that we achieve high delivery rates. To that end, we've made some exciting improvements to how email works in Church Social.

New service provider

Our biggest change is a new transactional email service provider. After careful consideration, we chose Postmark, a service dedicated to providing extremely high email delivery rates. While this change won't be immediately noticeable to our users, we're hoping it will make a difference in their inboxes. Less lost email. Less email in spam. And much quicker delivery rates.

Tracking of bounced emails

In addition to improving email delivery rates, we've also added some tooling to help in those situations when emails do bounce. This happens most frequently when congregations first join Church Social. A certain percentage of their member's email addresses are incorrect. Previously this was hard to fix, since Church Social didn't tell you which emails were bouncing. Well, now there is an "Failing email addresses" report for just this, found under the member management section. When you update a failing email address that member will be automatically removed from this report.

Subject lines added to the emailer

The emailer also got a nice little improvement. You can now set a (short) subject when sending emails from Church Social. This is a great way to give other members an idea of what you're emailing them about. The subject must be short, 30 characters or less, since it will be appended after the normal subject line. For example, here is what this looks like: Message from Jonathan Reinink: We now have subjects!

Replying to email

And finally, we've made some tweaks to how our HTML emails are rendered. Previously when you replied to an email from Church Social, it wouldn't display very well on some devices, like iPhones and iPads. We've corrected this, so responding to other members is now a little easier.

We hope you enjoy all these improvements!

We are pleased to announce that we are now offering free SSL certificates to all our church website hosting customers. This means that your church website will be available at a secure HTTPS address, in addition to the standard HTTP address.

One of the most requested Church Social features has just landed: recurring calendar events. You are now able to create calendar events that repeat daily, weekly or monthly. Simply enter a event start Date, and then select one of the repeating options from the Repeats drop down list. You can also specify a Repeat until date if the event does not repeat forever. Give it a try, we have done our best to keep this feature nice and simple!

Handling exceptions

One of the biggest challenges with recurring events is handling exceptions. For example, maybe you want to edit the title of only one event in your "Morning worship service" series to indicate that there is Lord's Supper that service. You can do this using the Apply to setting, which includes the following three options:

• All events in this series: Will apply the changes to all events in the series, even those in the past.
• This event and future events: Will apply the changes to the event instance you are editing, as well as all future events in that series.
• Only this event: Will apply the changes to only the event instance you are editing.

Use it carefully

We were a little hesitant to add this feature at first. Recurring events, if not used carefully, can lead to a less reliable calendar. For instance, maybe you have a bible study every other Thursday, except in unique situations. If you do not add an exception to the calendar for those situations, members of your congregation may think there is still bible study those days, when in fact there is not. We now feel the benefits of recurring events outweigh this risk, it is just an important thing to keep in mind as you manage your calendar.

While more and more "stuff" seems to be moving online, one thing many churches still have is a physical library of books. Today we're excited to announce a new Church Social feature that we believe will make these libraries a little more effective: a searchable library book directory.

Found under the archives tab is the new library section, where your church's librarian can add books and categories. Other members can then search and view these books. To get started, simply assign a member of your congregation with the new librarian role.

Coming soon to Church Social is a completely reworked "family sheet generator", which will replace the existing member photo directory binder sheet generator. It will initially have three themes: a classic full page version, a compact A5 version, and also a council information card. This will make it SUPER easy to create printable photo sheets for binder style directories. Stay tuned for more on that!

The Church Social emailer just got a big update. You can now send attachments as well as add basic formatting to your emails (links, bold, italics, lists, etc). The emailer now also auto-saves your message while you type, preventing you from loosing your work.

Let us know what you think!

Today we launched our brand new redesigned website! This new website coincides with some big changes we're making at Church Social. We're now offering WordPress websites and hosting as an alternative to our website builder. This will allow us to focus our energy and resources on building a better app, while still helping congregations create great looking public websites. Have a look around!

A big announcement today—the new document archive tool is now available! Found under the "Archives" section, there is a new tab labeled "Documents". Documents are organized into categories, and there is no limit on the number of categories you can create, or the amount of documents that you can upload.

A handy feature for councils is the restricted document categories. This will prevent access to documents in a specific category for all members who are not office bearers. In fact, they will not even see the category listed at all. There are five possible permission settings:

• Everyone
• Office Bearers
• Pastors
• Elders
• Deacons

The document archive has been designed so that all members of the congregation can contribute to it, meaning anyone can create, edit and delete documents. This is similar to how the current calendar and photo galleries function. For accountability purposes, we've built a new logging system into Church Social that tracks member activity. This report can be found within the "Member Management" tools, under "Reports". Currently only the document archive events are being logged, but overtime we'll be adding this to other areas of the app as well.

And as always, this feature is brand new, so please let us know if you run into any bugs!