What's New (May 12)

Hi Community friends! We have lots of great new features for you today in Blackbaud Church Management.

Prayer Requests
​​​​​​With the Prayer Wall, congregants can share prayer requests online and support others' prayer needs. To make the prayer wall easy to access, you can link to it from your church website and share it through email, text, and social media.

On the prayer wall:

• Congregants can view recent prayer requests and the number of people who already prayed for a request. After a congregant prays, they select I prayed to indicate their support.

• Congregants choose whether their request is private or public. Only church admins can view private requests.

• If a congregant doesn't enter a name on their request, it's anonymous. An email address is required to help church admins verify requests and provide outreach.

• To prevent spam, congregants must complete reCAPTCHA verification to submit a request.

From Constituents, Prayer Requests, church admins can manage pending prayer requests and respond to private requests with outreach as needed.

Admins can:

• Share the link to the prayer wall.

• Approve pending prayer requests.

• Delete or edit pending prayer requests that don’t meet church guidelines.

• Add a prayer request on behalf of someone else, such as from a prayer request card.

• Close an approved prayer request to remove it from the prayer wall and enter a reason for removal.

For more info, see Prayer Requests.

Add a family
To make data entry quicker and easier, you can now tab between fields when you add a family from the Directory or a staffed station. When you select Add adult or Add child, the screens are optimized so you can quickly add personal, contact, and care information for constituent records. For more information, see Add a Family.

Small groups
To help small group leaders easily manage their groups from their leader pages, they can now switch the list under Meetings to a day or week view. Previously, the list was only available as a month view.

Events
View room availability as you select rooms for events -- To help you easily reserve rooms and meeting spaces when you add or edit events, you can now view which rooms are available from the Select rooms option. Previously, you selected View all rooms to check availability and then selected Select room to book a room.

Add event categories -- To help organize the events and activities your church offers, you can now create categories from Events, Events Settings . For example, add categories for services, meetings, or fundraisers and choose them from the Category field when you add or edit events. To view specific events in a category, use the Event category filter (or Category column) in the list under Events. For more information, see Event Settings.

Quickly change dates on the events calendar -- Building on recent improvements to the calendar in Events, you can now easily select a specific date to base your day, week, or month view from. Previously, you manually scrolled to specific dates.

View event participant profile picture -- To help you easily identify event participants, participant records now include their profile pictures from constituent records. If a participant doesn’t have a profile picture, their initials appear.

From the participant’s record, you can add, update, or delete their profile picture or expand it to view the full image. For more information, see Participant Records.

Improvements to exported event participant lists -- In response to customer feedback, when you export a list of event participants, all name fields — including First, Middle, Last, Preferred, Former, Title, and Suffix — now appear in separate columns in the CSV file. This change makes it easier to sort exported participant lists by name.