You can now add images to sermons and sermon series. This can help add some visual interest to you sermon archive. To start, these images are only visible within the app, but we plan to also add them to the embeddable sermon archive, WordPress plugin, and our REST API.

Previously when using one of the bulk importers within the app, it was possible to make changes to your Excel or CSV file, and then hit "Refresh" within Church Social to upload and validate the file again. Unfortunately, this behaviour was broken recently in Google Chrome as a result of a new security restriction they added.

We have fixed this issue by removing the "Refresh" option, and making it clear that you now need to reselect the import file from your device.

This update has been applied to the people importer, schedule importer, contribution importer, and library importer.

A few days ago we announced that treasurers can now email receipts from within Church Social. Today, we have some more updates to the giving features, and more specifically the tax receipts, to make you aware of. Many churches are already busy getting their 2020 tax receipts ready, and we've made a number of improvements to make the process easier.

Legal church name

Some churches have a different legal name than the church name that they go by. This can be problematic when generating tax receipts, since the receipts must use the legal name. To accommodate this, we've added a new "legal name" option to the church settings page. You only need to set this if it's different from the name you go by.

Note, you must be an administrator to change the legal name setting. If you're not one, be sure to just ask your Church Social administrator to make this change for you.

Church mailing address

Also found on the church settings page is the church address. This address is used to display your church location in the map in the members section. Meaning, this is really your worship address, not necessarily your mailing address. For many churches, the worship address and mailing address are the same. However, that's not always the case.

Since it's important to show the mailing address on the tax receipts, we've added a new mailing address option on the church settings page. The mailing address will be preferred over the worship address when generating giving statements and tax receipts.

Note, you must be an administrator to change the church mailing address setting. If you're not one, be sure to just ask your Church Social administrator to make this change for you.

Member mailing address

Another mailing address change, this time for members. Previously, when selecting what member address to use on the tax receipts, we first looked for a home address, and if that didn't exist, we'd check for a mailing address. However, if a mailing address is set for a member, that's probably the preferred address to use. And so, we've made that change. Tax receipts will now prefer the member's mailing address over their home address.

Authorized (treasurer) name

Currently churches are able to upload an authorized signature that will be included on the tax receipts. However, we've had requests to also include the authorized person's name. You'll now find this as an option on the giving settings page. When setting this, the tax receipt will change from "Authorized signature:" to "Authorized signature of John Doe:". Unlike the signature, the authorized name is not required. Simply use this if you want it.

Middle name initials

Previously when issuing tax receipts, Church Social would include the initial(s) of the member's middle name(s). For example, "John R. & Beth A. Calvin". We did this because of the Canada Revenue Agency tax receipt requirements. However, speaking with our customers, we've realized there are some problems with this. Church Social uses the "common" first name, but the birth middle names for the initial(s). This can lead to weird situations.

For example, consider someone who uses their middle name as their common name, such as "Robert James Doe", who goes by "James". His tax receipt name would end up being "James J. Doe", which is obviously incorrect.

One solution here is to use the birth first name instead of the common first name. That would solve the "Robert James Doe" situation, since the tax receipt name would then be "Robert J. Doe". However, having spoken with customers about this, we believe using the birth first name will actually cause more issues than it solves, since people often prefer to not use their birth name.

In the end we've decided to simply remove the middle name initials entirely, at least until we're able to find a bulletproof system for them. Having done some research around this, it sounds like most of our customers haven't included the middle name(s) in the past, nor does this seem like a strong CRA requirement, especially considering that many people don't even have middle names.

Anonymous contributions statement

Finally, a couple updates not directly related to tax receipts. We recently added a new "Anonymous contributions" statement, which lists all the anonymous contributions made for a specified period of time, including the date, fund, payment method and the amount.

Your giving number

We've also updated the "My Contributions" page to include the member's giving number, should they have one set. This serves as a helpful reference for members who may not remember what their giving number is.

That's all we have for today. We hope these updates make the jobs of your treasurers easier. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.

We've added a number of new settings to make contribution receipts more accurate.

First, since some churches have a different legal name than the name they go by, there is a new "legal name" option on the church settings page. When generating receipts, the legal name will be preferred over the regular name.

Similarly, there is now new "mailing address" option on the church settings page, as churches often have a different mailing address than their worship address. The mailing address will be preferred over the worship address when generating receipts.

Finally, there is a new "authorized name" option on the giving settings page, which allows you to set the name associated with the authorized signature. This name will be shown with the authorized signature when generating receipts.

With tax season quickly approaching, we're happy to announce that treasurers are now able to email tax receipts to members and donors directly within Church Social.

When viewing receipts in Church Social, you'll now see a new "Email" option when you click the drop down button beside a receipt. Choosing this option allows treasurers to quickly email the receipt to the member (or donor) who made the contribution.

Of course, you can only email a receipt if the receipt has an email address associated with it. For members, this information is managed by administrators. For donors, treasurers are able to add an email address when editing a donor record.

Church Social automatically keeps track of when you last emailed a receipt in the "Last emailed" column. This can be a helpful reference for receipts that cannot be emailed, and need to be hand delivered or physically mailed instead.

Bulk emailing receipts

In addition to sending one off receipt emails, you can also send these emails in bulk. You can do this by clicking the drop down menu at the top right of the the receipts page, and then choosing the "Bulk email" option.

This will then show a popup window listing all the receipts within your current search parameters, allowing you to hand pick which receipts you'd like to email. You'll notice here that you cannot select receipts that have no email addresses available, or receipts that have been cancelled.

Keep in mind that Church Social allows you to email a receipt more than once, so be careful to not accidentally email the receipt twice, unless that's intended.

Also, one final note, when emailing receipts, a statement of the contributions will automatically be included as well.

Treasurers, we hope that this new feature makes your jobs a little easier this tax season!

After many months of development, we're extremely excited to announce the release of our new Church Social "light" native apps for iOS and Android. They are both already available for download in their respective stores.

We're calling them Church Social "light", since these apps only have a subset of the overall features available in the web app. To start, that will include:

• Calendar of events
• Member directory
• Messages
• Livestream
• Bulletin archive

Our goal with these new native apps is to provide members with the quickest possible access to key Church Social information. Here's how:

1. It's super fast We've designed the app for speed. It opens fast. The navigation is extremely simple. Almost everything is just a few touches away.
2. Login once No more having to enter your email address and password, just to look up a member's address. The Church Social app keeps you logged in.
3. Offline friendly Not connected to the Internet? No problem! The Church Social app works offline, meaning you always have access to your Church Social information.

To install the app, download it from

• Apple App Store
• Google Play Store

Let us know what you think!

Church Social now allows you to track background checks for the people within your account. When editing a person's profile, you'll see a new "Background check" option, which includes the following information:

1. You can upload a PDF version of that person's criminal record check (police check).
2. You can set the date that their criminal record check expires.
3. You can track the date that you completed any reference checks for this person.

There is also a new "Criminal record checks" report in the "Reports" section, which lists all people that have a criminal record check expiry date set. It groups these people into two sections: those with valid criminal record checks, and those with expired criminal record checks. Note, this report only includes people who have expired criminal record checks from the last six months.

Finally, there is a new notification that is sent on the first of each month to the administrators, which lists all people with criminal record checks expiring in the next six months, as well as any people who had their criminal record checks expire in the last six months.

If you've ever wanted to add your Church Social calendar to your Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook, you now can! We just added a new iCalendar integration to the app. This works with any application that supports the iCalendar format.

We've added two new iCalendar subscription feeds: one for the public church calendar, and another for each member's private calendar. Let's look at each.

Public church calendar feed

Your public church calendar, which is currently available via our API and WordPress plugin, is now also available as an iCalendar subscription feed. This feed is only available to administrators on the calendar settings page, and is intended as an alternative method of adding your public calendar to your website. Note, this feed only includes events that have been marked as "Visible to anyone".

Private member calendar feed

The second calendar feed we've added is a little more interesting. This calendar feed is unique to each member, and includes public events, private events, and schedule reminders. Members can find their subscription URL on the calendar page, under the "More" button, and then choosing the "Subscribe to calendar" option.

Since the iCalendar format doesn't support authentication, we've used "secret URLs" for this feature. This means each member's calendar URL is unique to them, and signed with an HTTP signature, meaning it cannot be modified. However, the URL is still publicly accessible, which is why it's important that members never share their private calendar URL with others. This is also why we've chosen to not include birthdays or anniversaries in this feed.

Event ending times

You may have noticed that we also added event ending times to the calendar last week. The iCalendar integration was the motivating driver behind that change. Having ending times makes the calendar week view make more sense. Any events that have a start time but no end time will be one hour long. Events without a start or end time are treated as "all day" events.

We hope this feature makes your Church Social calendar even more useful!

Today we're thrilled to announce the official launch of our new giving module in Church Social. This feature allows church treasurers to track member contributions, generate giving statements, create annual tax receipts, and even lets members view their own giving history within the app.

Works with your existing accounting software

Worth mentioning right away is that this is not intended to replace your existing accounting software. Rather, it's designed to work with it. Treasurers enter contributions into Church Social, and then simply take the totals from each deposit and enter them as a single record within their accounting software. This has a few benefits: -Since all your member information is already in Church Social, treasurers are not required to maintain a duplicate record of this information.

• Treasurers can continue using whatever accounting software they are most comfortable with. And it doesn't have to be church specific accounting software either. Quickbooks and Church Social are a great fit!
• Church Social adds a layer on top of your accounting software that provides common church related contribution management features, such as statement generation, tax receipting, giving numbers and more.

Funds

All contributions in Church Social are assigned to a fund. Funds can include your budget (regular voluntary contributions), special collections, mission efforts, building fundraisers, and more. Churches can create as many funds as needed.

Deposits

All contributions are tracked in batches, called deposits. Typically churches will create one deposit per fund per month, but this isn't a requirement. Each deposit may contain contributions from multiple funds and dates.

Contributions can be assigned to members (couples or individuals), or to non-members (called donors—more on that in a moment), or both. You can also create anonymous contributions by not assigning anyone.

Each contribution is assigned a payment method, such as cash, cheque, e-transfer, credit card, etc. You can also include extra information related to the payment method, such as the cheque or transaction number. Each deposit provides a subtotal for the different payment methods.

You can also mark contributions as "non-receiptable", to have them excluded from tax receipts. This is helpful in situations where contributions come from a donation source that has already issued a tax receipt (eg. CanadaHelps.org).

Import contributions

While the interface to enter deposits into Church Social has been carefully designed for quick entry, it's also possible to bulk import contributions from an Excel or CSV file.

Giving numbers

Many churches still use giving numbers (sometimes called envelope numbers). Church Social lets you assign giving numbers to members, which allows treasurers to search for members by those numbers when entering contributions. The giving number management tool also makes it easy to identify unused giving numbers.

Donors

As noted earlier, all contributions are assigned to either members or donors. Donors are organizations or non-members who have made contributions to your church. What's really neat is that you can assign contributions to a member and donor at the same time. This is helpful in situations where members make contributions through their businesses. This ensures that tax receipts are created for the business (the donor) and not the member. However, member statements will still include any contributions made via a business. It's even possible to link a member to a donor to make it easier to lookup that donor by that member's giving number.

Tax receipts

Our Canadian customers will really appreciate the new tax receipting functionality. Church Social allows you to quickly generate CRA (Canada Revenue Agency) compliant tax receipts from the member and donor contributions. Tax receipts are versioned and immutable, meaning any changes to the member information or contributions will result in a new, replacement tax receipt. Church Social keeps a full history of current and cancelled tax receipts, should you ever be asked for a historical receipt.

Creating tax receipts for an entire year is as simple as going to the "Create Receipts" page, reviewing all the eligible records, and clicking "Create". Church Social lets you preview each tax receipt before it's generated, so you can easily verify that all the information is correct.

Printing receipts in bulk is equally straight-forward. You can optionally choose to include a statement on the subsequent page listing all of the contributions for that tax receipt. And, if you're printing on both sides of the page, there's a print format option for two-sided printing, which adds any necessary blank pages to ensure that the start of one tax receipt doesn't print on the back of another. Receipts are also designed to work with #10 windowed envelopes.

Statements

Church Social also makes generating member giving statements a breeze. To create a statement, select the date range, which funds should be included, and what members to include. You can choose to include only members who have made contributions, or to also include members who have not made any contributions during that time period.

Like the tax receipts, there is a print format option to optimize for single vs two-sided printing. This is helpful for members who've made many contributions, and their statements span multiple pages. Statements are also designed to work with #10 windowed envelopes.

In addition to member statements, you can also generate statements for shepherding groups (wards/districts). Many churches provide giving statements like this to their office bearers.

Viewing your own contributions

Finally, the new donation tracking features are not only for treasurers. Churches can also (optionally) allow members to view their own contributions within the app. This is a great way to help members keep track of their giving.

Getting started

To start using the new donation tracking features today, enable the "Giving" feature in your church settings, and then assign a member with the "Treasurer" role. This will add a new "Giving" link in the main menu. If you intend to generate tax receipts, be sure to also add your church's charitable registration number as well as an authorized signature.

We hope that gives you a good overview of our new giving features! Please let us know what you think!

Church Social provides a powerful way of organizing your various church related schedules in a place where all your members can access them. And, they aren't simply static lists. Schedule reminders appear in the calendar, and even better, they are automatically emailed on a weekly basis, helping volunteers remember their tasks. Because, hey…it's easy to forget, right? This week we've introduced a number of improvements to make schedules even better.

Importing schedules

As great a schedules are, the truth is, getting them into Church Social hasn't been that easy. Previously, all entries had to be manually added within the app. We are thrilled to announce that schedule importing now exists! This allows you to bulk create your schedules in a program like Microsoft Excel, and then import that schedule into Church Social.

Improved editing

We've also made it easier to edit existing schedule entries. You can now edit the date and subject (person, family or group) on existing schedule entries.

Viewing past schedules

Have you ever wanted to see past dates for a schedule? You now can! Schedules are now organized into months. By default you see the current month, but you can also navigate forward, or backward in time.

Sorting schedules

In the schedule settings, you can now choose how to sort a schedule. There are two options: Date/Name (the default), and Date/Description/Name. This new option allows you to sort the schedule entries by your description field first, before the name. This can be helpful in certain situations. For example, a nursery schedule which includes an AM and PM value in the description.

Printing schedules

Finally, we've added the ability to print schedules. We actually introduced this late last year, but never officially announced it. This can be really handy for posting a schedule on a bulletin board at church, or sharing schedules with volunteers.

Today, we're incredibly excited to share a huge update we've made to the Church Social branding. This includes a new logo, website, and updated app. Helping us through the rebrand process was Joel Reynolds of Capture Studio. We're thrilled with the results.

New logo

We've said goodbye to the old scripty logo. It has served us well, but with this rebrand we really wanted to position ourselves as a software company. Our new corporate typeface is called Nexa, a versatile, modern sans-serif font. Maybe most notably we moved away from the burgundy to a more friendly colour palette, with teal being our new primary brand colour.

In addition to the wordmark, we also added an icon. It includes the roof and steeple of a church. The shingles of the roof make an (upside-down) wifi logo. The cross in the middle keeps our focus on what matters most—Christ. The icon was a much needed addition. We finally have something to put on our social media pages and in our site favicon.

New illustrations

Next we had Joel's brother, Ben Reynolds, create some amazing illustrations for us. Illustrations help us tell the Church Social story, without the need for stock photography. Our goal with the illustrations was to look professional, while also being friendly and not coming across too serious. We think Ben did an amazing job! 😍

New website

Then came the really fun part—redesigning our website! Looking back in our blog archive, I now realize that our last website redesign happened almost exactly five years ago. This redesign is certainly the best iteration yet! Not only does the whole brand come together in a really powerful way, we've also added a lot more content. In particular, we improved on our feature pages, now doing a much better job of explaining what Church Social is, and how it's various features can be a blessing to church life.

App refresh

Last, but certainly not least, we updated the app to match our new look. Fortunately this was a fairly painless process, since we did a complete app redesign only last year. We took this opportunity to improve the app header and navigation a little.

So there you have it! This is a huge milestone for Church Social, and we believe positions us well for the future. We hope you all enjoy the new look as much as we do!

Without a question, the biggest concern when congregations first switch to Church Social is the safety and privacy of their membership records. It can be uncomfortable moving records from their own control, often a file on their own computer, up to “the cloud”, some random computer somewhere in the world.

Of course, doing this has huge benefits to the church, which is why more and more churches are making this move. But it does require churches to ask the question: “Are our membership records safe?” Church records, after all, typically include a lot of personally identifiable information (PII).

In reality, even churches who keep their data offline are often much more online than they realize. For example, many church administrators backup their files to Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or Apple iCloud. Plus, emailing membership reports and data between church members and committees is common practice. As churches, we need to be aware of how this data is being used, and do our best to keep it safe.

Church Social takes our role in this process extremely serious. Which is why we’ve taken three key steps to ensure the ongoing safety of our customer’s data.

1. Ground-up application rewrite

The first step happened early last year when we completed a ground-up rewrite of Church Social. The previous iteration of the app was almost seven years old, and was built on dated technology. We wanted to start over, making security a priority at every layer of the application.

Church Social now uses a highly reputable, industry leading server-side web framework, called Laravel, which follows modern best security practices, especially when it comes to user authentication, authorization, session management, password hashing and encryption.

The benefits of using a popular framework like Laravel are enormous. It’s been installed millions of times, and is contributed to by thousands of developers around the world. This ultimately leads to a battle-hardened software platform that we can trust deeply to build our product on top of.

2. New hosting infrastructure

The next step was an improvement to our hosting infrastructure. There are two main attack vectors on any given website: the application, and the server it’s being hosted on. Both need to be rock solid in order for the entire system to be secure.

And, while our previous hosting provider was fantastic, their business model wasn’t right for us. They provided us with a barebones server, which we then had to maintain ourselves. That meant installing software, running security updates, managing backups, etc. It meant that we had to be both application security experts, and web hosting security experts at the same time. That was more responsibility than we felt comfortable with.

When the redesign was launched, our hosting was also moved to a new provider called Heroku. Besides being an industry leading hosting provider, known for hosting some of the Internet’s biggest brands, they also offered a whole extra level of service. Instead of simply providing us with a server that we were responsible for managing, Heroku manages the entire hosting infrastructure. They install software, they run updates, they deal with critical security vulnerabilities that arise, and handle backups.

Put simply, Heroku has allowed us to focus all our efforts on building Church Social, knowing that our web servers are safe with them.

If you’re interested in learning more about Heroku’s security practices, you can do so on their website, here.

3. Third-party security audit

The third step happened earlier this year, when we contracted the Digital Boundary Group, a web security firm located in London, Ontario to do a complete web application penetration test on Church Social. This is something we’ve wanted to do for quite some time but, frankly, is quite expensive. With thankfulness we were able to make this investment into the product in March.

We were pleased with the results of the audit, which found no critical vulnerabilities. Digital Boundary Group did make a number of recommendations, many of which we’ve already implemented. Put simply, Church Social has never been more secure.

Looking to the future, we intend to do more security audits, as technologies change, and as new features are added to the app. Web application security isn’t an item we can check off our list and be done with. Rather it’s become an integral part of our ongoing development process and business.

If you’d like to learn more specifics about our security practices, please visit our security page.

We're extremely excited to announce a huge update to the reporting features in Church Social. These changes really started all the way back when we launched the redesign early in 2018, but our grand vision for the reporting features wasn't fully complete until this week!

Before we go into any details, we invite you to watch this video, which provides a good high-level overview of the new features:

New default reports

The first thing you'll notice with the new reports page is a set of default reports. Church Social now comes with almost 20 default reports, and we suspect this will only grow. We've organized them into categories: membership reports, administrative reports, important date reports, backup reports, and custom reports.

Let me highlight a few of the default reports:

Ward lists

While the ward (or district) list reports are not new to Church Social, we have added a couple really handy print options. Now when you print a ward report, you can choose the orientation (portrait or landscape), as well as how many columns you'd like the wards displayed in. These two options allow you to nicely fine-tune the ward list reports for your particular congregation.

Families who cannot be emailed

The messaging tools in Church Social are great. They allow you to quickly email all the members of your congregation within seconds. This is especially helpful when there are cancellations or last minute notifications. For example, maybe a church service is cancelled due to poor weather. However, as handy as that is, there is always a challenge with families who do not receive messages from Church Social. Maybe these are older members, or simply members who do not have an account setup within the app. How do you notify them? That's where the new "Families who cannot be emailed" report becomes extremely helpful. This report lists all the families who do not receive Church Social messages, with their phone numbers, organized by ward.

Member activity reports

The new member activity reports might be our favourite addition to the new reporting features. These reports show all the activity within the congregation by year. This includes members who were born, baptized, did profession of faith, got married, joined the congregation, left the congregation, or passed away. This report will be especially helpful when putting together annual reports, or sharing statistics at an annual congregational meeting.

Deceased family report

An important aspect of being a good office bearer is being in-tune with the members under your care. This is especially true when it comes to members who have lost loved ones, which is why we've added a new "Deceased family" report. This report lists all deceased members who still have family within your congregation. This includes the deceased member's name, the date they passed away, their birth date, as well as their wedding anniversary date, if they were married.

Improved report builder

In addition to the default reports, we've also made some significant changes to the report builder. In fact, there are now two report builders: one for families, and one for people. The report builder has been completely redesigned, and it's now easier than ever to build custom reports.

Columns, filters and sorting

We've added a ton of new columns, filters and sorting options. It's also extremely easy to click on an existing filter and make changes to it. Each one of these has it's own set of options, which you can use to tailor your report. For example, when you choose the "age" column, you can specify whether you want the member's current age, or their age as of this year. We've worked really hard to provide as many different options as possible!

Grouping

One of our favourite features of the new report builder is the new "group by" options. When viewing large sets of data, grouping records together visually can go a long way to making the report easier to read. The grouping is also intelligent with how it handles columns that have multiple values. For example, if you group a family report by wards, and a specific family belongs to more than one ward, the report builder automatically repeats that family for each ward they belong to.

Saving reports

Yes, you can finally save reports! Administrators, we've heard you loud and clear on this. Whenever you generate a custom report, you have the option to save it to your custom reports list. Later, you can view that report, or even make further changes to it. When you make changes, you'll be given the choice to save those changes, or discard them.

Exporting and printing reports

Church Social makes it extremely easy to export your data out of Church Social. Whether it's one of the default reports, or a custom report, you can click the "options" button to download it as a CSV file (to be used in Excel), or you can print it, which will generate a print-ready PDF. In this update we also added the ability to specify the orientation of the PDF. You can choose either portrait or landscape, which can be really handy for reports with lots of columns.

Click to view a profile

One other small, but handy update to the reports is the ability to click on any row to view the profile for that person or family. This makes it really easy to make changes to members or families from a report. Take the new "Bouncing emails" report as an example. This report lists all the members in your congregation who have a failing email address. You can click on the member to view their profile, and then fix their email address!

I hope that gives you a good overview of the new reporting features. We're pretty excited about this update, to say the least! 😊 It is our hope that these new features will help simplify administrative tasks within your congregation, and also provide helpful support to the office bearers as they carry out their pastoral work.

Our bulk importer is an extremely helpful tool for new congregations first coming onto the platform. It allows them to import their existing membership records from other software, granted it can be provided in an Excel (CSV) format. However, since it's difficult to represent relationships in a flat spreadsheet format, it was never possible to import families or marriages. This has always been a nuisance, since it meant a bunch of work was still required after doing the member import. Administrators had to manually go through each member in their congregation, and group them into families, while also adding marriage information. We wanted this process to be easier, so last week we set out to improve it!

The people importer now has five new possible fields: family, marriage_status, marriage_start_date, marriage_end_date and ward. Meaning you can now automatically group members into families using the family field, setup marriages using the marriage_status, marriage_start_date and marriage_end_date fields, and as a bonus you can even set the family's ward (district) using the ward field. You can read more about how to use these new fields in our support article here.

A common task for church administrators (statisticians) is providing member information to new churches when a member moves away. This information typically accompanies an attestation document, and includes things like birth dates, baptism and profession of faith details, contact information, marriage dates, and the like. We wanted to help make the process of sharing this information easier, so we added a new "transfer documents" feature to Church Social.

Administrators can find the new transfer documents in the "People" section, once you've selected a user. You'll see a new "download transfer documents" option under the family tools drop-down menu. You can even select which family members are included in the report. This is helpful in situations where a only a child moves away.