Care & Follow Up
With your first service under your belt, you have successfully navigated through some of the main features of UCare, including People, Groups, Meetings and Check-in. However, UCare has much more to offer! Helping churches love people means creating a system best optimized for providing care. This means being in a position to ensure people aren’t falling through the cracks but also that new people are welcomed and cared for. UCare has the tools that you need to enable you to provide the best care to your people.
These tools include Attendance tracking, Forms and Processes. Attendance tracking allows you to assess the health of your Groups by seeing who your regulars are and who might feel disengaged and enables your team to follow up with these people. Forms and Processes, meanwhile, provide seamless entry for new people to be entered into UCare and tracked through becoming regular church attendees.
This Part will cover these three features. However, Forms and Processes have broad applications; only a few will be covered here.
Attendance tracking & Follow-up
By default, UCare will give you a snapshot of your most recent attendance in the Dashboard.
You can also view attendance stats for specific Groups. To do so, simply select the Group and scroll down.
You can also export attendance stats as a report. To do so, click Reports and select Export Attendance:
Once you’ve selected the options to include, you can choose your Export format. Click Generate when ready.
Attendance stats and reports will help identify the people who aren’t connected. Once you’ve determined who these people are, you can assign follow-up tasks to staff and create notes to optimise your care. Notes are a great way to provide UCare users with information about People.
To assign a task to follow up with a person, first, open their profile, click the options button in the top right and select Add task:
Note: To add notes, click the Notes section. Notes can be restricted so that only those with access can view them.
Once selected, you can specify the task and assign it to a team member. Click Add task when done.
The team members will see a notification when they log into UCare:
If a due date has been set, they will receive an email 30 minutes before the task is due. If you want them to be notified immediately, select today’s date.
Once you have a task to follow up with someone, several ways are available to contact them. The Person’s profile will have a phone number if one was recorded. However, you can send the person an email or SMS through UCare.
To do so, click the SMS button; you must have a Clickatell account to do this from a PC or Mac or the email button in the top right of the profile, near the options.
Forms & Processes
Forms and Processes are great features to get new people into UCare and get connected and established in the happenings of the church community. Using Forms, you can customise your questions to capture the required information, and this is often the best way to place someone into a Process. Processes allow you to specify the steps you will track people through, allowing for various automated actions.
While we will primarily look at integrating New People, Forms and Processes can be used for many applications. We will cover Forms first, but please keep in mind that the Process must also be created to link a Form to a Process.
To create a new Form, click + New → Form:
From here, you can begin to create the Form:
Type allows you to categorize your forms to make finding them more accessible. You might have Form types such as Church, Youth, Admin, etc. Once you’ve specified this, Name the Form and choose the Owner. The owner can then be notified using the notify owner toggle when a new response is filled. You can click Add description to provide information about the Form.
Once these have been specified, let’s set the questions for the Form. As this is a simple New Person Form, it will only require basic, personal information, i.e., First name, Last name, Mobile, and Email. The key to making this process seamless is the ability to add Automations.
Click the dropdown box under the Questions heading to see the many available options. For this example, we only need a Person question:
The Title for the question will be what the person filling it in will see.
There are many toggles you can use to set the necessary options. By default, UCare has these toggles off, so you can set these as required.
Click Field labels to view and adjust what labels appear on the Form.
Lastly, to seamlessly make this Form work with a Process, click Automations and then the + Automation button to add an automation.
Once an Automation is added, you can set whether the Automation applies to All people, Only new people or Only existing people, giving you the flexibility to customise how this works.
We will add the new person to the New Person Process for this example. The third dropdown specifies which Step in the Process they will go into. You can add multiple Automations to the same Form. If you would like to add a new person to a Group, it would look like this:
With these parameters, any person who does not have a profile in UCare and fills out the Form will be added to the New Person Process and the Regulars Group.
Once you’re satisfied with your questions and settings, you can click Done to finalize. Set your security permissions and click Save to complete your Form.
Now that your Form is complete, you can access it by clicking Forms from the navbar:
Your Form will appear under the Type specified:
From here, you can share the Form via a link or QR code. To do this, use the share button in the top right.
If you prefer to use New Person cards, you can print the QR code onto it so that new people can fill them out on their devices. If you have a manual Form, a team member with UCare access can input the information by clicking the + New response button on the Form page.
Processes
Processes are highly customizable and can be tailored to fit multiple applications. In this example, we’ll create a simple New Person Process.
To create a new Process, click + New → Process:
From here, you can begin to set up the new Process:
Type allows you to categorize your Processes, making them more accessible and easier to find using UCare filters. Name the Form accordingly and set the Owner. Use the + Add description button to provide additional information about the Process.
Steps
Steps in Processes are where the magic happens. You can add multiple customizable steps to Processes that perform specific actions. Click the + Add step button to add a new step. Once a new step is created, click it to edit.
Name the step accordingly and use the +Add description button to describe each step. The Default assignee can be different for each step, but this will be the person overseeing the step. Use the notification toggle to notify the assignee via email.
The Due date allows you to allocate the appropriate time to each step. Since this is just the initial email and first follow-up, we’ll set it to Immediately.
Actions
Adding actions to a step will allow you to limit manual handling and automate the administrative side of things so that you can focus on providing the best care. There are many Actions to choose from, so take your time to look through them. For this example, we will be sending the new person an email.
Once this option is selected, you can type the email sent to people when they enter this step. Click Done when you have assigned all the actions you would like to the step. You can add multiple actions to the same step. For example, if the Form was not set to place someone into a Group, you can use an Action in a Process instead of an Automation in a Form.
Once this step is completed, you can add more. Each church may have a different new person Process, which can be customized to your requirements.
When all the steps are input into UCare, specify your security access to the Process and click Save to complete the Process.
Now that the New Person Process is complete, you can access it by clicking Processes on the navbar.
Use the Type filter to find your Process, and click it to view and edit.
The Task board will show you all the Steps and which people are currently in them. You can view the Process in full screen using the Full-Screen button in the top right corner.
From here, you can drag and drop people into Steps. To edit the Steps and Actions or to add a new Step click the options button and select Edit Process.
The Edit Process page will look similar to the New Process page. To add new steps, navigate to where you want the Step to be added, i.e., before or after a given step, and click the + button. These will appear in the margin as you hover the cursor over a step.
As mentioned, Forms and Processes can be used for various scenarios in church life. Experimentation will be the key to utilizing these to their fullest potential. Take the time to test out different Forms and Process ideas before moving on to the next phase of your UCare setup.
In the next Part, we will look at integrating your volunteer and service teams into UCare.