This SOP outlines the steps to create a self-check-in form using the Ministry Brands platform for church attendance. It guides users through setting up a simple form for attendees and managing attendance through workflows, ensuring a streamlined check-in process for various church activities.
Hey everyone, in today's video tutorial we're going to show you how to create a form to allow for self-check-in, uh, using our mobile app or using your digital bulletin or your website, but it's really pretty easy to do this within Ministry Brands. So if you're using Ministry Brands as your church database system, um, it's great. I used it for many years. We have staff on our team that has used it for many years, and one of the ways that we've found that makes it really easy to do check-in for maybe, like, adult Bible studies. We have some churches that use this check-in for their Sunday worship service. There's lots of ways to do this, but really, all you need to do is first go in, and you're going to go create a form in the back end. So Ministry Brands is also great. So Shelby Next, at Simple Church, they run under a few different names, but if this back end looks familiar, then you're on a Ministry Brands database. So you're going to go to Forms and create a simple form. That form, I would make it as super simple as possible, as far as maybe just their email, their first name, last name type of thing. Now in that what you can then do is then you can go over to Workflows, and you add a new workflow, and then you're going to add a trigger here. On the first trigger, you're going to say a form submission. Whenever a form is submitted, and you're going to go select which form that is, and then you want to map the full name to full name and email to email, phone to phone. I would keep it, again, as simple as possible because people are going to be coming in each week and submitting that. And then the next thing you can do is click Submit. Click on Add Action, and you can say they are present in a group. And then it's going to say, what group are you wanting to mark them present in? And then you just click on Done and Save. So, really, what that does is it sets up a trigger that says anytime somebody fills out this form that you've selected, map the full name and the email. Email or phone are typically the easiest to match people on. And then the action is, mark them present in a group. And so that's a simple way. There's a that some churches will use this to take adult Sunday school class attendance. Uhm, there's some other ways that you can do that. Now, there's other questions about what are some other ways that you can do, uh, check-in with Ministry Brands. So they have a few other options. They do have a QR code, or like a barcode type of scanner. Uhm, we do have a way to add a URL. It's a barcode based off of someone's phone number. So what they can do is basically just add their phone number in. It creates a barcode and then you associate that barcode with the person. That's more for like child check-in. Really what we've seen and experimenting with that with various churches is that barcode takes just as long or longer for people to pull up on their phone. They go to the mobile app. Go to check-in, they get the QR code, then they scan it. And then they still have to scan it, add a register for child check-in, they still have to select their kids, and then they still have to click print. So really all you did was shortcut them from typing in their last name on an iPad. Um, instead now they're going to their phone and getting that barcode to then get a, uh, you know, uh, name tag printed off. So we don't really see a huge time-saving. Most of the churches we've seen experiment and play with the QR code, which I personally tried that at our own college ministry in the church I worked at. And we just found that people were just spending so much time, they were spending more time looking things up than they could have been just typing in their last name, clicking on their name and checking in their family. The barcode didn't really save a save child check in that much time. But for adult check in, if you want to use this option, all it is is just a simple form. And then you would just embed this form on your website or we could help you embed it in your mobile app or in your digital bulletin. And you could have different forms. So you could even have like a whole check-in page and it's like, Hey, like, uh, this is this Sunday school check-in. This is this Sunday school check-in. You can have different forms. Um, that could be really easy for people to check people in. So the other option that I would say we did enjoy, um, and we found this working well for leaders of Bible studies is you can use the Shelby next or the simple church app for leaders where you basically just download simple church app and then you can download it or the Shelby next app and then you log in as a small group leader. So you would then have to go into your groups and assign like Zach is a leader to a group. Once he's assigned to a leader of a group, he can then take attendance in the Shelby next or in the simple church or whatever the ministry brands name you're under that person can then take attendance for their group. So if they want to just quickly just click like, Hey, these five out of 10 people were here. They can do that as well. So there's lots of different ways you can do check in. We want to show you a few ways to do that and that we've experienced and seen helpful as long as our staff and some of our clients. So let us know if you have any questions. Thanks.