In addition to uploading a family photo, families can now also include a short biography about themselves in Church Social. You can add this from the my profile settings page, and it will then appear under your photo on the family page.

But what should you include? Imagine you were introducing your family to a new member in the congregation. What would you share? Include that here! Maybe share the things that interest you — your hobbies, favourite music, what you do for work, where you went to college, how God has impacted your life — anything!

This is a wonderful way to help the congregation become better acquainted with one another, and is especially great for new members at your church.

Treasurers can now filter contribution receipts to only include those that have not been emailed yet. This is helpful when you want to only print the tax receipts that need to be hand delivered or mailed.

By default family correction emails are automatically sent to all administrators and statisticians. You can now override that behaviour by explicitly setting which users receive these emails. You can find this new option on the "People" settings page under the "Family corrections" heading.

We've just made a small update to schedules to allow exporting schedule entries to Excel (CSV). You can find this option on the schedule page in the three-dot dropdown menu in the top right of the page, and then selecting "Export entries".

We have just added the ability to send out same-day schedule reminders. Please note that schedule reminders are sent at 5am in your congregation's local time.

We've just released a small fix for nested lists in messages. Previously if you tried to create a nested list within another list, the formatting of those lists got messed up after sending the message. This has been corrected.

We've updated the app to integrate better on native devices when you add the web app website to your home screen. In particular, on iOS there was previously some issues where clicking links within the app would open in a new Safari window. This has been corrected.

A new version of our Android app has been released, which includes two bug fixes.

First, it was previously not possible to update your family photo on the "My Profile" screen. That issue has been corrected.

Second, it was previously not possible to watch the livestream video in fullscreen landscape mode. This is now possible if you have auto-rotate enabled on your device.

When creating messages you can now apply basic formatting, such as bolding, italics, lists, and maybe the most useful—links. And, in addition to the formatting toolbar, the rich text editor also supports the following shortcuts:

• Bold: Control B
• Italicize: Control I
• Underline: Control U
• Create a bulleted list: Control Shift 8
• Create a numbered list: Control Shift 7
• Create a link: Control K
• Add a line break: Shift Enter

Note, on macOS, replace the Control key in these examples with the Command key.

We've fixed a bug on the edit person page (only available to administrators) where when you updated someone's group email preferences (in the edit email dialog), it wouldn't actually save those changes.

You can now personalize prayer requests a little more by adding a photo to them.

We've added a new email notification that is sent to all active members (with an email address set) as soon as new prayer requests are created.

If you'd like to disable this behaviour, there is an option for this on the prayers settings page. There is also a new "Prayer request notifications" option on the "My Profile" page, should an individual not want to receive these notifications.

It's now possible to require that messages created in Church Social first receive approval from a message approver before they are actually sent. You can find this new option on the message settings page under the "Message Approvals" heading.

By default, when this feature is enabled, all messages will require approval, unless they are sent to less than 15 people. You can adjust this threshold in the message settings. Additionally, you can optionally choose to auto approve messages from:

• Office bearers
• Group admins to their groups
• Pre-approved users

To enable the message approvals feature, you must set at least one message approver. When a message requires approval, the message approvers will receive an email notification, making them aware that a message requires approval. They'll be presented with the choice to either approve or deny the message. In the event that they deny the message, they can optionally provide a reason why, which will be sent to the original sender.

We've corrected a bug with the family reports where the email column would be blank in situations where a family only has one member. This was most noticeable in the "Family contact list" report.

We've added the ability to add and remove families from a shepherding group directly from the group page. Previously the only way to change this was to edit this on a person's page in the "People" section.

Now when you (as an administrator) visit a shepherding group page, you'll see a new "Edit families" option in the three-dot dropdown menu. From there you'll see a list of all the active families within your church, and can add or remove them from that group.

Note, there is a "Remove families from existing shepherding groups when adding" option in this dialog, which will automatically remove a family from all their existing shepherding groups. This can be really helpful if families only ever exist in one shepherding group in your church.