Routines are automated group member processes that help you to automatically guide and inform group members step by step depending on their role and status and manage their memberships.
This allows you to easily and reliably map workflows or processes such as integrating new people, updating certificates of good conduct or organising leisure activity registrations easily and reliably. ChurchTools automatically executes them for you when a group member is assigned a certain role and status. For a quick start, you will find several sample templates in the group settings for the routines that you can use to get started.
How do routines work? #
Depending on the role and status of the group member, you can use routines to influence a wide range of other elements in ChurchTools – both at group and system level. Numerous actions are available to you for this purpose, which can be executed in a freely selectable sequence, with customizable delays or in loops:
- Add a member of your own group with a specific status/role combination to other groups
- Group membership status of the person in their own group remains unchanged, but their role or group membership fields can be changed.
- Adjust group membership status in your own group
- Terminate group membership
- Send e-mail
- Trigger tasks for follow-up managers
- Invite or archive people at system level
For example, you can welcome a new group member with an automatic e-mail that contains lots of information about the group and puts them in touch with a contact person, and at the same time schedule a follow-up for a person responsible for integrating the new group member into the group.
Or ensure that a group member who takes on a leadership role is automatically added to a higher-level group in their district, where a coach is then in turn informed about the new leader.
In order to protect children and young people, employees in the children’s and youth sector should provide a current certificate of good conduct, which should be updated every five years. You can solve this by adding new leaders or employees of such groups to a “Certificate of good conduct required” group via automatic group memberships. In this group, you can then use routines to ensure that a certificate of good conduct is submitted for the first time and then automatically followed up before it expires so that a new certificate of good conduct can be requested and submitted in good time.
One group member, one routine #
Only one routine is possible for each combination of role and status. As group members always have exactly one status and one role, this means that exactly one routine can always be used for each group member. Duplications and overlaps are not possible.
In a routine, you can clearly see which step of the routine the group members are currently in. Clicking on the avatars of the group members in a routine step opens a complete list with links to the person entries.
Who can use routines? #
People with the group-internal permission to manage routines can create and edit routines in the group settings of their group.
Users who are assigned one of the following global permissions can also use routines:
- Edit group (edit group)
- Edit groups of a group type – except hidden (edit groups of grouptype
) - Edit group memberships of a group (edit groupmemberships of group)
- Edit group memberships of groups of a group type (edit group memberships of grouptype)
- Manage groups – i.e. create, edit, delete and more (administer groups)
You can only select the actions for the routines that you could also perform manually, i.e. without a routine.