In the interests of child and youth protection, leaders and employees in the children’s and youth sector should have a current certificate of good conduct. The certificates are only valid for five years and must then be updated. The certificate should be submitted to a responsible person and the submission should be documented.
ChurchTools supports you in this process by automatically prompting leaders and employees to submit their certificate of good conduct and reminding them in good time that an update is necessary.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to add leaders or employees of groups for which a certificate of good conduct has not yet been submitted to a “Certificates of good conduct” group using automatic memberships. In this group, you can then use routines to ensure that a certificate of good conduct is submitted for the first time and that automatic inquiries are made before it expires so that leaders or employees can apply for a new certificate of good conduct in good time and submit it to the person responsible. We explain exactly how to do this in this article. What we do not address here is how to do this for managers and employees whose certificate of good conduct has been available for a longer period of time.
Prerequisites #
We will show you how to do this using individual groups for which you want to keep an eye on the leadership certificates. The only thing you need to recreate this are your children’s and youth groups with leaders and employees in your ChurchTools. You can also start here if you have not yet fully created your group structures in ChurchTools.
1. Create and customize groups #
First, call up the Groups module (1) in your ChurchTools, create a new group (2), name it “Certificates of good conduct” (3) and select the group type “Properties” (4).
Once the group has been created, find the person or persons responsible for keeping track of the certificates of good conduct using the plus symbol under Leader (5) and add them to the group.
If you want to read more about how to do this, read the article How to create a group?
2. Create, test and activate routine for certificates of good conduct #
In the group, open the settings (1) for routines (2) at the bottom left of the menu and click on the “Member” (4) Role under Apply template (3).
Now select the “Certificate of good conduct” template (5) and click on Apply (6).
Once you have applied the template, customize the terms and texts of the template for all group membership statuses “Requested” (8), “Active” (9) and “To delete” (10) for you. Finally, activate (11) the routines for each individual group membership status.
We explain how to proceed step by step in more detail in the article How to create/edit a routine?
3. Set and activate automatic membership #
Once you have created and activated the routines for the participation role, go to Automatic memberships (2) in the group settings (1).
Set personal filter #
In the People filter section (3), you will first see a filter that filters out all archived and deceased people (4). Simply leave this filter untouched and click on the bottom plus (5).
Click on Membership in a group (6) to create a new filter.
Membership in a group
Use the pencil icon to filter out only the active groups (1).
Call up another group filter (3) via the plus below (2).
Select from all the groups that are involved with children and young people in your church (4).
Then click on the plus (5) under Define filter... and select Group membership (6).
Select the “Leader” and “Member” (7) roles here.
Set actions #
Switch to the Actions section directly below. Under People in the filter result (1), set them to be added to the “Certificates of good conduct” group with the group membership status Requested and the Role “Member” (2).
Of course, it can happen that managers or employees give up their task. In this case, you set the following for the people who are no longer in the filter result (3)
- that their requests are deleted (4) and
- persons marked as active or to be deleted are automatically removed from the group (5 and 6).
Activate automatic membership #
Once the person filter and the actions have been set correctly, activate Automatic membership at the top of the page and set it to run automatically. This will ensure that your group remains up to date when changes are made.
Once you have created your group and set up the routines and automatic membership for it, your only tasks as the person responsible are to carry out due follow-ups and have conversations where necessary. ChurchTools makes it as easy as possible for you to organize and keep appointments.
Collection of further links #
You can find out more about groups and their hierarchy in our overview of the Groups module and in the article What is the hierarchy?
Of course, we have also explained exactly what routines are and how you can use them in our Academy. A good starting point is the article Understanding routines.
You can use automatic memberships wherever you want to bring people together in groups. You can find everything you need to know about this topic in our Automatic memberships category.