What's New (September 29)

Here are the latest features in Blackbaud Church Management!

Prayer requests
Admins can now pin approved prayer requests to make sure they stay at the top of the public prayer wall. For example, you may want to pin a prayer request for a critical care need, such as a child with a sudden medical emergency, or for a broader concern that impacts lots of members, such as teachers and students returning to school.

To pin a request, from Constituents, Prayer requests, under Prayer requests, select Pin request from the prayer request’s menu. To remove the request from the Pinned area of the wall, select Unpin request. For more information, see Prayer Requests.

Church calendar
From Events, you can share feeds of the event calendar to personal calendar apps or your church’s website. To help manage the events that appear in them, you can now mark which events to display on public calendars. Also, you can set criteria for events to include in different feeds, such whether they’re for public or private calendars or in specific event categories. Previously, all events — including activities such as staff meetings and facility rentals — were included in each feed.



To promote an event to the entire congregation, add or edit it and select Display on public calendars under Public calendar. By default, all new and existing events are set as private.

To make the feed available to others, from Events, select Share calendar and choose which events to include. Next, copy the feed link and paste it in a calendar app.

• For personal use, add the link to a calendar app such as Outlook or Google Calendar.

• For public use, add the link to the calendar tool in the content management system for your church website.

  Tip: Use the instructions in your calendar app or content management system to learn how to set up the feed.
  
  Note: To limit who can manage public calendar events, use the new Public calendar event content permission for event roles from Control panel, Security.

Congregant timeline
To give you more insight about a congregant’s engagement with your church, you can now view attendance information for small groups and classes under Timeline on their constituent record. Previously, you could only view giving, event, action, and appeal activities from the timeline.

A dot appears on the timeline for each month the congregant attended at least one meeting or class. To view a list of which meetings or classes they attended (or didn’t), select a dot.



Also, you can now select:

• Work with full timeline to open a larger version of the timeline and view the small groups and classes the congregant attends.

• Settings to choose the types of data to view on the timeline and the order to display them in.

For more information, see Timeline.

Congregant email history
To help track how responsive a congregant is to your outreach, you can now view messages you send to them from Blackbaud Church Management on their constituent record under Email history. Previously, you had to open individual messages in Email to confirm which constituents you sent them to. For more information, see Email History.

Note: Only messages sent from Email and Workflow designer appear under Email history. The history doesn’t include automated emails such as confirmations, or emails sent from a small group leader or volunteer coordinator. You can view messages sent since March 30, 2020