Overview of Safe Church
Church Social includes a Safe Church to help make managing background checks and other abuse prevention information for your volunteers and members of your congregation easier. This feature also includes a dedicated Safe church coordinator role which allows assigned members to manage the Safe Church records for your members.
The Safe Church page — found in the People section — provides a dedicated interface for managing:
- Criminal record checks
- Working With Children Check numbers and expiry dates (for Australian churches)
- Reference checks
- A new "Training date" field
- A new "Safe Church notes" field for other abuse prevention-related information
This page is accessible to users with the new Safe church coordinator role, as well as to administrators and statisticians.
Expiring background check email notifications are sent to Safe church coordinators instead of administrators. If you're an administrator and would still like to receive these emails, simply add yourself as a safe church coordinator on the People settings page.
The Safe Church page is enabled by default for churches that had previously entered any background check information. If it's disabled for your church and you'd like to enable it, you can do so from the People settings page.
Members will also receive email notifications when their criminal record checks are nearing expiry — or if they’ve already expired. This feature helps members stay on top of renewals and reduces the workload for admins and Safe church coordinators.
These emails are sent on the first day of each month, starting six months before a criminal record check expires and continuing for up to six months after it has expired. In other words, if a member doesn’t renew it right away, they can expect up to 12 monthly reminder emails nudging them to take care of it.