Month: September 2024

Something Old, Something New — Assigning Family Attributes

In this article, we’ll review something old, and present something new.

Something old: from the Family/Household query screen, you can do a wholesale change of billing status. For example, suppose you’ve collected a few dozen prospective members during the High Holiday season. And you’ve appropriately entered them into ShalomCloud with a status of “Prospect.” A couple of weeks go by, and several of those prospective contacts have gone ahead and joined the congregation. Via the query, you can use the checkbox on the right, and use the red button to

And now for something new:

Hopefully, you’re acquainted with the idea of family attributes. You’d declare them near the bottom of the Configuration menu. Then, you’d assign them in one of two ways:

  • In the Maintenance -> Add/Update Families screen, or
  • Under Maintenance -> Assign Family (yours might say Household) Attr.

There is now a third way, via Queries – Families, as described in the second paragraph above. But, instead of using the “Change status for checked” button, you select an attribute, and use the new button, “Add attribute to families.”

assign attribute to families

For an animated look at what’s described in this article, feel free to follow this link.

New Selection on Statements

There is now a new selection on statements, namely a “not” attribute.

In our quest to continually provide you with more flexibility, we’ve rolled out quite a few more options for producing periodic statements, over the years. To summarize here, those options have included:

  • Choose your email template when sending statements.
  • Include or suppress payment details.
  • Include or exclude credit balances.
  • Select a subset of categories (e.g., school-only).
  • Include or exclude a recent-payments section.
  • Select statement recipients by family/household attributes.

This is yet another of those incremental improvements. In regard to those attributes — you can now select by households that do NOT have a certain attribute.

Couple of examples where this might prove useful.

  • Your standard is to produce statements by email. However, you have some families who expressly want a paper statement only. In that case, you might set up an attribute, “Surface mail only.” Then, when your embark on your standard statement run, you can select Does not have attribute Surface mail only.
  • Your standard practice is to run statements monthly. In contrast, a few families want this communication quarterly. Accordingly, you’d set up an attribute, such as “Quarterly.” Then in your monthly run, select Does not have attribute Quarterly.

Here’s a video depicting this idea in motion.

Dramatic Speed Improvement When Assigning Member Attributes

You will now notice a dramatic speed improvement when assigning member attributes.

Ensure you are utilizing the powerful feature of assigning attributes (a.k.a. tags, groups) to individuals in your congregation. If you haven’t yet, the following video will give you a concise introduction.

Admittedly, there had been an unwelcome delay when navigating to Maintenance -> Assign Member Attr, especially with a large number of members and attributes. We’re excited to inform you that improvements are now in place to reduce delays and enhance your experience significantly.

You will now see a significant improvement in response time, with the assignment screen displaying 50% to 95% faster.

Also — we’ve included more information on the assign screen.

Before this change, you would see:

  • Last name
  • First name
  • Email
  • And a link to display the member record

Now, you will see

  • Status
  • Last name
  • First name
  • Email
  • Family/Household code
  • And a link to display the member record.

Here’s a video illustrating the before-change and after-change.

Dramatic Speed Improvement When Assigning Member Attributes