Office-bearer visit scheduling and reporting

This feature allows church leaders to track both past and future member visits within the app, helping ensure that all members are regularly visited. It also helps elders, deacons, and pastors coordinate their visits better, avoiding situations where a family may go without a visit for a year and then receive multiple visits in the same week.

There is also an option to include notes when creating visits, making it easy to reference them in the future if needed. Given that these notes may contain sensitive information, we've taken great care to ensure that only those who should see them can. We've provided a variety of settings for churches to control which office-bearers can view visit notes—whether it's only those who went on the visit, those within the same shepherding group (ward/district), those with the same role (elder/deacon), or a combination of these settings.

Scheduling visits

New visits can be created from the calendar page, which conveniently displays all your own visits. To create a new visit just click on the Create button above the calendar and choose the New visit option. You can then set the date and time of the visit, who is being visited and which office-bearers are attending the visit. An alternate place to create a visit is by going to a family's page and then choosing the New visit option from the 3-dot menu in the top right of the family page.

Church Social will send office-bearers an email reminder the day before a scheduled visit—just in case they forget (though we know they won’t!).

Viewing and reporting on visits

In the reports area, there is a new "Family Visits" section, which includes the following reports:

• Visits: A complete list of all past and future visits, which can be filtered by date, visit type (elder/deacon/pastor), who made the visit, who received the visit, shepherding group, and more.
• My visits: Same as the "Visits" report but automatically filtered to show only your own visits.
• Longest without a visit: This report highlights families who have gone the longest without receiving a visit—helpful for identifying higher-priority visits.

There is also an option to mark visits as "reported on." This provides a simple way to track which visits have been reported at council, consistory, or deacon meetings.

When you view any visit from a report you will see a listing of all recent visits to that person listed below the visit details that you currently have open. This makes finding other visits very quick and allows for quick access to other recent visits and notes, helping with preparation for upcoming visits.

Enabling the Visits feature

If you would like to start using the visit tracking feature in your church's account, you can enable it in the settings area here: https://app.churchsocial.com/settings/office-bearers

In the settings page you are also able to set who can see visit notes and for how long they can see them.