How would you go about this?

[Bridgecity]

Hey Truman,

I want to run a application of Ascribe that we'd like to be able to do, and have you either tell me how I might be able to accomplish it with the tools that exist, or talk about what might be able to be changed to allow us to do this, OK?

Membership at Bridge City is an annual commitment.  Every year in the late fall we have an opportunity for current members to re-certify that the markers of membership are true of them.  Currently the things in ascribe we use regarding membership are these:
1.  The member status radio button in the person's profile.
2.  Under Discipleship, we have steps set up for the qualifications of membership that would lead to a first-time commitment. 

That's all fine.

The issue for us is the annual part.  Each year we send out a letter to all the members discussing the annual re-certification, and giving them an opportunity to do so.  It also includes an opportunity for them to initiate a pastoral visit.

What I need is some way to quickly identify who HASN't re-certified so that I can make personal contact with them.

Today what I did was pretty convoluted.  I printed out a list of the Family Members (Advanced person search, member status).  I set up a membership re-certification discipleship step, and checked off everyone from who we've received re-certifications from.  Then I printed out a list of all the people who have completed that discipleship step.  Then I manually compared the two lists.  Everyone on the first list that isn't on the second list are people I need to contact.

OK...  now you know what I'm trying to do.  Is there a more direct way to get at this problem in Ascribe currently?  If not, are there some programming tricks you can pull that would give me some automation to this process?

(Possible ideas...
1.  When the discipleship steps that are qualifications for membership are met, the Family Member radio button for that person automatically gets selected. 
2.  For our use, having a discipleship step that's the annual re-certification, could have a 360 day-deadline, and when the deadline passes, that step is indicated as overdue in some obvious way, easily creating a list of people who need personal contact.
3. ?)

Thanks for your thought on this.

I'm looking forward to the new member portal, too!

M.

[Truman]

Hi Marc,

Happy New Year!

Thanks for your post. Here's my recommendation. Each year in the Fall, make a top-level goal and call it "Membership Recertification 2006" or something like that. Set the step deadline to however many days out is appropriate at that time.

Then go to Persons > Person Update Tool. For all "active members" (or in your case "family members"), initiate the "Membership Recertification 2006" goal.

Then use the goal tools for that goal to track whether someone has been recertified or not.

Then perhaps I should do is set up "workflow rules" for Ascribe to follow similar to those found in the File Archive and Support Form modules. That way you can set up the discipleship module to automatically set a person's membership status to "active member" or "family member" if they achieve that recertification goal. You could also have Ascribe automatically send out an email to the member regarding the recert.

I'm still working on the new member portal, as well as some other overarching changes to Ascribe.

Truman

[Bridgecity]

That sounds like just the thing, Truman.  I knew there was a way around this.  I like the workflow rules idea.  That would be perfect for us.

Thanks for your input.

Any timeline on the member portal, yet? (No nagging, just interested...)

M.

[Truman]

The member portal upgrade has turned out to involve almost half the modules Ascribe supports. So it's taking a while. I had wanted to get it out by the end of 2006. But December was so busy. You know how it is.

Right now I'm working on a way to configure the member portal from within the intranet application. You'll be able to pre-configure the way the modules in the member portal are organized by default using a user-friendly drag-n-drop method.

It's hard to make an estimate of time frame. But I'm really hoping for a couple weeks.

thanks, Marc!
Truman

[Bridgecity]

That's exciting, Truman!  Keep up the great work you do, with your passion and commitment to excellence.

[Bridgecity]

Hey Truman,

I was following through on this to start our 2009 year.  I created a top-level goal, and used the tool to assign it to all the current members.  Everything looked great.  But then I realized I didn't make the steps of the goal right.  So I deleted the goal, and started over. 

But when I created the new goal, with the right steps, it listed 65 active members, even though it showed no actual members in the member list.  Then when I went into the bulk tool to apply it to the membership, it said that 65 people matched the criteria, but none of them would be effected by the update.

That sounds like it think that those 65 people are already in the goal.  So, I went to the goal, and in the little quick reference table, it shows the goal as having 65 active people.  But I click on that to see the detail, and it shows 0 members.

What's up here?

[Truman]

I'm not sure what caused this problem.

But I deleted the 65 goal members.

Then I used the mass person update tool to add all active members to the 2009 recertification goal, typed in the word "Yes" and proceeded with the update. Looks like it took fine.

[Bridgecity]

Weird! Thanks for your help and patience.