Church Director Product Blog

Church Director now has support for adding new team members directly from the assignments screen! This means that you don’t have to stop in the middle of assigning team members for a church service or event to add someone who recently joined your team.

Just click the ‘Add Team Member’ link, then enter their first or last name to see if they already exist in the system. If you find them, one button will add them to your team. If they aren’t in the system yet, simply provide their name/email, save, and then immediately assign them to a role for your event. It is that simple!

We are also experimenting with some new features, including integration with other systems. Stay tuned!

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Our hosting provider found a problem with our database server and restored it. Total downtime was about 45 minutes. No data was lost and all services are now restored.

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The new year is a time for reflecting and for making changes. So, I’ve been hard at work rolling out a few minor improvements to the site since the last release at Christmas. The changes are focused mostly on small bug fixes and some behind-the-scenes work to prepare Church Director for some upcoming features. Expect to see another post outlining these features.

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As a Christmas gift to our Church Director users, we have rolled out the next private beta, version 4.0. This release includes some major screen updates, including cleanup and various improvements. These updates will provide a more pleasant experience when using the application, and also includes some code cleanup that will prepare us for the next release that is coming soon.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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I noticed that Microsoft is starting to push down IE7 to desktops as a Windows update. Just to let you know, I have tested Church Director on IE7 and all features are working as expected. While there are a few small visual issues, they are quite minimal and will not impact usage. I’ll update the site soon to fix these minor issues when using this new browser. In the meantime, know that we are fully tested on IE7 and it is safe to upgrade with respect to Church Director.

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I’m not 100% sure about that statistic, but you can now create job roles “on the fly” from the assignments page. If you’ve ever found yourself needing to add a new job role before you assign a team member, this feature is for you! Just click the “Create a new role” box and provide a role name - we’ll do the rest. And, with the magic of modern browsers, we can do this without losing your in-progress assignment plan since it all happens without a page refresh. I also hope to use this feature to make it even easier to create team planners in the future, so stay tuned!

Let us know what you think using our feedback form, available at the top of any page.

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After some long nights getting this highly requested feature written and tested, you can now save current assignments as a named group and apply them with one click. Once a group is created, just click the group name link to apply the group team members to their appropriate roles.

Uses include worship teams that have alternating teams, such as Sun/Wed or Sun 1/Sun 2, small groups that rotate locations, as well as other ministries.
An screenshot is shown to the right:

If you aren’t using Church Director yet, visit our beta signup and register for the next closed beta.

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I’ve been rolling out new features into production the last few weeks, and I’m hearing some great feedback from the beta users. Recently, I’ve worked hard to provide key performance metrics that are easy to see and understand. In addition, the number of clicks it takes to schedule volunteers have been cut by over half! Oh, and we squashed a few bugs in the application as well. The next few releases will be focused toward some of the other features previously promised, most notably group assignments. Along the way, we’ll continue to clean-up and refine the user interface to make it easier to read and use.
If you are interested in participating in our next private beta, visit the Beta Signup page and register using our quick signup form.

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I have been working hard to release the next private beta of Church Director. Planned improvements to the event scheduling features include:

• Faster weekly scheduling with even fewer clicks between event assignments
• Group creation for quickly assigning pre-defined teams (”team 1″/”team 2″) to an event
• More-granular control of email and profile setting

If you are interested in participating in our next private beta, visit the Beta Signup page.

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We have been in our current closed beta cycle for about 4 weeks now, and we are getting some great feedback. We have made improvements to the following areas:

• Reporting system
• Improved access control
• Improved privacy control
• Better event cancellation support

Overall, our users are very happy with the system and have already started to see improvements in dealing with their volunteer base. We are excited to start opening up requests for another closed beta cycle soon, so if you are interested in participating, please fill out our beta signup form.

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