Person statuses, campuses and departments categorize and structure the data you record in your ChurchTools to give you a better overview.
By combining personal statuses, campuses and departments, you can map complex congregation situations. It’s worth coming up with a well thought-out concept – preferably together with your congregation leadership!
Personal status #
The person statuses describe the relationships between people and your congregation. Each person always has exactly one person status in ChurchTools. By default, these are: Member, Friend, Interested person or To be deleted. You will later use the person statuses to assign the first permissions for the system.
Campus #
A campus in ChurchTools is a kind of virtual administration room in which all the data collected in it is labeled. This marked data can be filtered and can also be authorized separately. Each person in ChurchTools is always assigned to exactly one campus.
There is always at least one campus for the congregation in ChurchTools, which is designated as the campus – center by default. You can store the church information for this campus in the system settings and create and publish a congregation profile in Public Relations.
You can add further campuses for a daughter congrgation or a missionary organization, for example. You also manage the data for this campus in your ChurchTools. You can create and publish separate campus profiles for this in Public Relations.
You can authorize the campuses data separately. This creates clarity in the use of ChurchTools.
To be able to use the campuses as filters, you assign people, groups, events, calendars, resources and wiki categories to a location. If you do not assign a campus, this means that the corresponding group, resource, etc. is independent of a campus and visible to all users of all campuses. Of course, this always depends on whether the user is allowed to see the group, resource, etc. at all.
If a user is only allowed to see data from one campus, no selection of the campus is displayed in the top left menu and the filter cannot be used.
Department #
A department is a part of a campus that operates largely independently and wishes to use its own list of people. This subdivision makes sense if there are departments that have their own management structure and list of people, e.g. a division of congregation and youth work. If this is not the case, it makes more sense to use Groups to structure the data. If you have stored more than one department for your ChurchTools, each person must be assigned to at least one of the departments.
You can also authorize the data of the departments separately.