Category: Synagogue Membership Tracking

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.

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

Query for Deceased Members

You may or may not be aware that there is a flag to mark a member as deceased:

You can maintain this field under family maintenance; however, we recommend that you use more of an automated process, as described in this article.

But that’s not the point of this post. By default, the member query excludes deceased people. That’s in order to avoid the possibility of sending communications, either text or email, to those individuals.

In contrast, you may be interested in seeing information about those deceased persons. This change enables you to do that, by checking a box on the member query:

Note that, when you do choose to show deceased members, ShalomCloud automatically includes all billing statuses. That is a convenience, so that you needn’t worry about the default billing status of Active.

More than one assigned user per note; now include secondary users

Expanding on our memos/notes capability, ShalomCloud now accommodates assigning additional users to a memo. The term you’ll see on the screen is “interested parties.”

Until now, you could assign one and only one user to a memo. There is still a primary “assigned to” person; but now, you can select any number of additional users who have access to that memo. All that’s required is that they exist as users in the system, and that they have at least the family permission. If an intended user is not in the list, you’d need to create that person as a ShalomCloud user, and give that user at least Read permission on families.

Each memo contains a checkbox to declare it as private. Once so declared, only users attached to that memo, either as primary or as an interested party, will be able to edit the item. That includes changing the reminder date, marking it complete, and even changing the topic. Non-attached users will, as before, be able to view most fields, other than the body of the note, which says, “*** Contents of note private ***”.

If you’re not at all familiar with this aspect of ShalomCloud, let us repeat this information from a prior post, to wit:

For the notes/memos–you can now receive an email with your individual tasks that are past due (which appear in red), or due within the next seven days.  Your administrator can determine the timing and frequency of those “push” emails–for example, the system can send the emails at 11 pm, seven days a week; or, if that seems too often, perhaps 5 am Monday through Friday.

Feel free to view the visual demonstration of this expanded capability.

How to gather and verify information about your members

We have two new small enhancements regarding the “Turnaround Document” — so-called because, when you send it to your congregation, they it turn it back in, with additions and corrections. We’ve had this capability for three years (https://blog.shalomcloud.com/2020/03/18/the-turnaround-document-2/), but it’s worth going over again.

First of all — if you’re not familiar with this term in ShalomCloud, perhaps it’s best to view the tutorial. That will cover what it is, what purpose it serves, and how to send it to your congregation. Basically, it’s a document that can either be sent via postal mail, one per family, or by email. It displays every piece of non-financial data in ShalomCloud on behalf of that family, with a place to write in additions and corrections.

The two new aspects of the turnaround document are:

  • Including the three emergency contact fields — a name, phone number, and email address.
  • A place to put a free-form message, after the individual members of the household, and before the Yahrzeits observed by anyone in the household.

Here’s a video that runs through the entire process.

Now has a free-form area, below members and above Yahrzeits

Mass Maintenance to Titles

To help bring more consistency to your data, we now have the ability to perform mass maintenance to titles. This is in the general area of maintenance for families and members.

Example: Suppose you have a mixture of Mr (no period) and Mr. (with a period). Or Dr (no period) and Dr. (with a period). Until now, you would have to change each title individually.

Newly available — within Configuration -> Titles, you’ll see a panel with the heading Mass Change of Titles. Simply enter the “from” title, the “to” title, and touch “Update titles.” In response, the system will do three things: (1) Create the “to” title if it doesn’t exist; (2) go through all the members, changing their titles; (3) delete the “from” title.

Here’s a short video demonstrating how to make mass maintenance to titles.

mass change of titles
Mass Change of Titles

New features for Membership Directory

We now have available a few new features for the membership directory.

The most visible change is the option to print the directory in a linear, up-and-down organization. Before now, the only choice was to use a “Z-Pattern.” That is, ShalomCloud would print the first entry in the upper left corner. The the second name in the upper right corner. Then the third name on the next row, under the first name.

Now, you can choose to first fill the left column, then fill the right column. Then, a new page, continuing to the end.

Another change in the new style is displaying page numbers.

One more thing — if you populate the field known as “informal label,” you can now include that in the directory.

This video runs through all of new features for the membership directory.

Additional options for directory
Additional options for directory

When a Congregant Passes Away

When a congregant passes away, there are a number of tasks to take care of. Until now, we provided a list of those actions, which you had to perform one by one.

With this enhancement, we have streamlined that process and automated quite a few steps. Where the steps do require manual input, we’ve gathered those inputs into fewer screens than you had to visit in the past.

The manual steps are:

  • Update the formal name, informal name, and informal label of the family
  • Possibly changing the billing status, especially if the one who passed away was the last survivor of the family

The automated steps — those that ShalomCloud performs without your intervention are:

  • Sets the “deceased” flag for the member.
  • Erases the email address (to avoid inadvertently sending an email from ShalomCloud).
  • Erases the cell phone (to avoid inadvertently sending a text message from ShalomCloud).
  • Changes the role-within-family to “Deceased.”
  • For all Yahrzeit notifications that the newly deceased was receiving, sets the notification flag to “N”. This avoids the embarrassing possibility of sending Yahrzeit reminders.
  • Tags the Yahrzeit as a former member. Thus, you can query Yahrzeits for former members who passed away during a given time period.

After performing these actions, both manual and automated, the system then provides you with a link to all the Yahrzeits currently observed by the person who passed away. This gives you the opportunity to declare other reminders, thus keeping alive the lineage.

To see this process in action, please peruse this video, illustrating the process to follow when a congregant passes away.

Death of a congregant
Death of a Congregant

Move a person from one family to another

ShalomCloud now offers a convenient way to move a person from one family to another.

On occasion, you may have added a person to the wrong family. Or, you may have what are, in reality, duplicate records that you wish to consolidate. You may even have situations where families merge.

For any of these situations, we now offer a simple way to move a person from one family to another. It’s just a new field amidst the normal family/member maintenance.

Behind the scenes, there are a couple of clean-up actions that occur:

  1. The system checks to see whether there are any financial transactions tied to the ‘from’ family.
  2. The system checks whether there are any people remaining in that family.

If either is true, nothing further happens. Otherwise, the system goes ahead and deletes the ‘from’ family. If, for some reason, you want to see what was in the family record, you can go to the family/member audit trail to see those values.

Here is a very short video on this topic.

Move person from one family to another.
Move person from one family to another

Segment the Turnaround Document

Our larger customers may be interested in the capability to segment the turnaround document.

What is the turnaround document, you might wonder? For background, please have a look at this video. This is a document that holds all the fields we have collected for families, individuals, and Yahrzeits. The goal is to send each document to its respective family; and then the family would “turn around” that document with additions and corrections.

For large congregations, the program might well time out. In that case, you would want to take advantage of the new ability to segment the turnaround document — to run it by range of letters. It defaults to “A” to “Z.” If that’s too many, you might try entering something like “A” to “D”, then “E” through “H”, etc.

Here you may watch a video to see how this feature works.

Turnaround document selections