It's been over a year since we first announced our plans to do a ground-up redesign of Church Social. You have all been extremely patient with us, especially considering our original mid-2017 goals. Thank you for that. And we've got some great news! We've set an official launch date of February 1, 2018.

This redesign truly represents our commitment to the project long term. It's more than just a new visual design. It's a new technical backbone. This will make the software more secure and easier to develop new features for.

An important change we also intend to make is more frequent release cycles. While this redesign was necessary, we very much understand that months of "radio silence" is not helpful for our customers. Expect to see updates become a monthly, or even weekly occurrence in 2018.

See you in February! 😊

—Jonathan Reinink

Late last year we announced that we had started a ground-up redesign of Church Social. In addition to a brand new look for the app, we promised some exciting new features including a powerful new report builder, a new groups feature, improved document and sermon archives, a new bulletin board and more. We are thrilled with how this is all coming together. And while we don't have an official launch date set, the plan is to release it before the summer is out!

Introducing messages

This redesign has been a great exercise for us. It's pushed us to take a step back and ask some tough questions. For example, in what areas could Church Social be serving congregations better? One area we discovered that needed some attention was the emailer. While this is easily our most popular feature, it has some problems. Members can easily get email message overload, especially in larger congregations. There is also no way to have group discussions. Messages are very much one-way only. Further, if email delivery ever fails (which it does from time to time), those messages are lost forever. We wanted to do better!

In the new Church Social the emailer has been renamed to "messages". All messages will be saved within the app, meaning members experiencing issues with email delivery can always find a copy by logging into Church Social. From within the app members can also reply to group messages, making discussions within committees or clubs super simple. And most importantly, members can reduce the amount of messages they receive by subscribing only the groups that interest them. In fact, members can completely disable email notifications and still read all their messages within the app. There is even a daily digest email, summarizing all unread messages from that day.

We've always been extremely hesitant about introducing yet another messaging app to our users. For this reason the new messages feature will continue to work great via email. This is especially important for those members who enjoy receiving email communications but don't log into the app frequently.

Follow along

If you'd like to follow along with our progress, the best place to do that is on social media. We've been posting sneak preview screenshots of the redesign on Facebook and Twitter.

It's been quite some time since we last gave an update on Church Social. It's amazing how time goes by. It seems like just yesterday we were sharing our plans for 2016, and here we are in mid-November. Once again we've been blessed with a year of growth, welcoming ten new congregations. We added a number of new features, including a new library archive and recurring calendar events. We completed the transition to WordPress for public websites, and were excited to offer free SSL certificates to those customers. We worked hard to improve email delivery rates, with the emailer now sending out well over 100,000 emails per month! We doubled down our support efforts, significantly reducing customer support response times. We even purchased a new domain.

Ground-up redesign

Which leads us to 2017. Aside from bug fixes, we've officially stopped development on the current iteration of Church Social and have begun a ground-up redesign. In preparation for a number of new, big features, it felt like the right time to start fresh. The current design is over six years old, and is starting to show its age. Not only will Church Social be receiving a major face-lift, the underlying source code is being completely rewritten. This is a big undertaking, one we hope will make Church Social more secure, simpler to use, and easier to develop new features for. Here is a sneak peak!

New features

While we're still working out all the details, the redesign will include the following new features:

• Mobile friendly: The new design will be fully responsive, meaning it will look great on tablets and phones.
• Groups: Create custom groups within your church for bible studies, committees, wards and more. Then easily message these groups, create group schedules and share documents.
• Report builder: The member export tool is getting a total overhaul. Generate custom member and family reports using our new reporting engine. Export reports by downloading them as PDF or Excel files.
• Document archive: A greatly improved document archive, with drag-and-drop file uploading, simpler sorting, and improved searching.
• Schedules: You'll finally be able to import schedules in addition to creating them manually. Also, see your scheduled items on the main calendar.
• Library: Get your library books imported quickly with the new Amazon integration, or even just import them from a file. Plus mark books as "checked out" to keep track of which books members are reading.
• Sermon archive: Improved sermon archive searching, including bible passage, date and topical searches. Streamlined sermon uploading, including the ability to upload almost any audio format, not just MP3 files.
• Bulletin board: A new, simple place to share things with your congregation that just don't make sense in your weekly bulletin, calendar of events, or emails to the congregation.

Timeline

Our goal is to have this redesign done by mid-2017. Please keep in mind that we do not plan to make any further feature improvements to the current version of the software. We very much appreciate your patience as we work hard to get this update out the door!

We're excited to announce that we're the proud new owners of the domain churchsocial.com. We've had our eyes on this domain for quite some time, but being a two word "dot com" it came at a high asking price. In fact, the domain was first registered all the way back in April of 2001, roughly 15 years ago!

Fortunately this year we were financially in a position to make a bid for the domain. It felt like the right time, especially in light of the changes in 2015 and our re-commitment to Church Social moving forward. The new domain is easier to remember, shorter to type, and generally more professional than our previous domain.

Practically this has some implications moving forward, most of which will happen automatically:

• Our primary domain will become churchsocial.com effective immediately
• Our old domain churchsocialapp.com will simply redirect to this new domain
• The app will now be found at app.churchsocial.com
• Our support email address is now [email protected]
• Our sales email address is now [email protected]

We do recommend that all Church Social users update their safe-sender list to ensure that they continue to receive our emails without issue. To do this simply add [email protected] to your safe-senders list.

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!