Staying Connected

Technology can be a great tool to help you stay connected to people, and to help people be connected to others. At least technology should make the task of generating things that help with staying connected as easy as possible. CMD is great for this! Here are a few suggestions for how to use CMD to stay connected with others or to help others stay connected to others: • Make liberal use of CMD’s Talents and Activities fields. If you will indicate the talents and activities of your parishioners, you have an automatic and natural group of people. You can easily generate contact lists which you can distribute to those who share a talent or activity, do group e-mails or text messages from within CMD. • Get your elders (or if they can’t/won’t, create a visitation team) and use the Spiritual Care Provider features to allow them to record their contacts and visits with those to whom they are assigned. If your elders make regular contact with the names they are assigned, your whole church will not just feel more connected, they will, in reality, be more connected! • Give your outreach ministry leaders access to CMD, and teach them how to use the Christian Learning tool, the one that tracks a person exploring Christianity, so that they can have a tool that helps them track the learning progress of a seeker. If they are able to record their progress, it will be easier to know what next to teach the seeker in their journey of faith learning. • If you are a pastoral or office staff member, use the phone and tablet apps to contact your members, and to even record information about them in the Comments fields or visitation records, both of which can be updated on either the phone or tablet apps. Having all this information at your fingertips can be a real help. You can quickly review items of relevant information on your phone or tablet before starting a home or hospital visit. • Use the attendance tracking features in CMD to closely monitor the attendance patterns of your members. CMD can print a number of useful reports for attendance, including the Attendance Grid, which can display a person’s attendance for any event (such as church, SS, mid-week meetings, etc) in a grid format that can show up to 6 months worth of weekly attendance. You can see at a glance who is coming regularly and who is not. Those who are not may be slipping away from your community. Noting those whose attendance has become sporadic or even non-existent and then following up with timely contacts can really help keep the connection to your church family alive. • Use the attendance phone and tablet apps (hosted CMD system only) with a team of leaders assigned to track attendance in real time at an event such as church, SS, mid-week services, etc. If you have a team of leaders who are on the lookout for members to mark them present, they will notice when they are not there. They can also be a great source to tap into for asking people to follow-up with those whose attendance has begun to lag. There are many other ways CMD can be of use to you in helping you stay connected that you will discover as you start to use the software.