What's New (December 10)

Here is the latest in Blackbaud Church Management!

Small groups
The new small group search pages makes it easy for people to find the right group for them and request to join. From the small group page, they can search for small groups that fit their lifestyle, such as by gender, topic, category, proximity, schedule, or whether they accept new members or welcome children. To share the URL for the small group search page with your congregation, from Constituents, Small groups, under Small groups, select Copy. For more information, see Small Groups.

When a prospective small group participant selects Request to join from the small group search page, your church is notified by email. To designate the email recipient, from Constituents, Settings, under Constituent settings, select Small groups. Under Small group search, select Edit and then enter the email address of the recipient. For more information, see Small Group Settings.

Duplicate constituent records
To help you maintain a clean and accurate directory, Blackbaud Church Management automatically checks for duplicates when you add a constituent record for a congregant. When you enter their first and last name, existing constituent records that match by name appear in a list.

While this process helps your church office avoid adding duplicate records during data entry, there are other ways duplicates can sneak into your database, such as when congregants make gifts in the MobileMission app or online forms when matches with existing records aren't exact. You may also have duplicates that were imported from your old church management system during implementation.

To manage duplicate records, from Tools, Data Health, under Possible duplicates, you can view statistics about potential duplicates, review matches, and merge records. Blackbaud Church Management automatically refreshes the list of potential duplicates multiple times a day. To help decide whether to merge two records or keep them separate, you can further review the information matched between possible duplicates. You can also choose which specific information to keep from each record during the merge, such as names, addresses, relationships, small groups, and membership information. For more information, see Duplicate Management.

Volunteers
To help you manage congregants who give their time to your church or your church's events, you can now create a team of volunteers for scheduling and communication purposes. For example, if members of your congregation serve as Sunday morning greeters, you will want to create a team such as "Sunday greeters".

To add a new team of volunteers, from Volunteers, Volunteers, select New team. Enter the name of the team you wish to add, such as "Wedding service volunteers" or "Volunteer leaders" and provide a description of the team to inform other users of team details. You can then add volunteers to each team. For more information, see Volunteers List .

Events
Fees and payments: To better highlight when a gift exceeds the registration fees for a participant, you can now view the additional donation amount on their record. From an event’s record, under Participants, select Work with participants. From the list, select the participant and then view their additional donation under Fees and payments. For more information, see Fees and Payments.

Note: To more accurately reflect the information that appears on a participant’s record, Registration fees is now labeled Fees and payments.

Card is present: In Events, you can now indicate if a physical card is present when you add a credit card payment for a gift from a participant's record under Fees and payments. If you have a payment configuration that processes payments through Blackbaud Merchant Services and you select the credit card payment method, the Card is present option appears.

Select Card is present to physically swipe a credit card through a USB card reader. If you don't select this option, you must key in the credit card information, and the payment is recorded as a card-not-present transaction. For more information, see Payment Information.

Note: Don't see this option? To process card-present transactions, you must process payments through Blackbaud Merchant Services.

Custom fields
To help you more easily review information on constituent records, you can now sort and filter fields under Custom fields.

To sort the categories alphabetically, select Sort and choose whether you want to see the categories in ascending or descending order. To filter by field category, select Filter and choose the category you want to see. For more information, see Constituent Records.