Something I’ve been planning for a long time is the ability to track attendance for events. Just basic head counts collected over time. Every Sunday at church I see a volunteer in the back, pen in hand, counting each person and writing the tally down. Perhaps it gets put into a spreadsheet, perhaps just written down in a book. Either way it’s nice information to have and I thought Stafftool would be a great place to keep track of it all, however, it wasn’t something that made it into the initial launch. Recently, though, some of the great users in the support forums were asking about and discussing Event Attendance Tracking and it got me excited about it getting it going now that it looked like it was indeed something that people needed. So, I’m happy to announce a first pass “preview” of attendance tracking.
Stafftool, being a web-based application, of course runs in your web browser with nothing special to install or keep updated on your computer or servers. In fact, that’s one of the best parts of using web apps.
However, there’s a certain appeal to having a specialized program on your computer for some things…it makes it feel a bit more “real” to see a program icon in your dock, waiting for you to click on it to get some serious business done. Also, it would be nice to have something productive like Stafftool or your Gmail account open in something that won’t be affected by something like a Rickroll gone bad or someone’s bloated MySpace profile page that takes your entire browser down. It would be great to be able to separate the things you need open from the things that are nice to have open…but how?
The answer? Site specific browsers. In this post I’ll show you how easy it is to create a Stafftool “application” on your Mac.
Continue reading ‘Announcing Stafftool.app (well, kind of…)’
Just pushed out a couple really cool features.
First up - Improved Searching.
You can now search in the iPhone version. Need to look up someone’s info really quickly but don’t know their last name or don’t want to go through a few pages of contacts? Just search!
Simply click on the search icon and a search form will appear. Just type in what you’re looking for and click the go button. If your search results in one contact match, you’ll be taken directly to that person’s page, otherwise you’ll be shown a list of results.
Now, if you use Firefox, you know it’s a great browser. You might even know there are other search engines available in the search field where Google usually sits. And, if you’ve really dug into Firefox, you’ll also know that you can add other search engines to that list. I’ve got good news - you can now add your Stafftool account to that list of available search engines for easy access to your information at any time.
Adding Stafftool is easy…just go to your account in Firefox and you’ll notice that the drop down menu will have a bit of a glow to it:
Click on that glowing menu icon, and you’ll see this:
Click the Add “Stafftool” menu option and you’ll be greeted with the Stafftool specific search box!
Now, as long as you’re logged into your account, you can enter anything you’re looking for, such as someone’s first name, or the name of an upcoming event. Type it in, hit enter and you’ll be taken to your Stafftool account with either a listing of results or the person you’re looking for.
Next up - iCal Organizers
The ability to add organizers to events was recently added. However, it didn’t carry over to the public iCal feed that is available to subscribe to. So, that’s been added. Now, when you view an event that has an organizer (iCal only allows one organizer per event to the best of my knowledge) they’ll show up and you can email them.
Much easier to see who to contact with any questions.
Enjoy!
A few churches have requested the ability to have finer controls over the contents of public profiles, such as the ability to only show a person’s email address, but not their phone number. This is common when a person wants to be listed in the public directory, but doesn’t necessarily want all of their info to be made available, just a minimal set so other people know they’re there and can contact them by their preferred means. So, I just deployed the ability for public profiles to be “limited” which will allow just this.
Just a quick little post to let you know that the latest iPhone and iPod Touch update lets you save websites directly to your home springboard screen with its own icon. So, Stafftool now has its own custom icon when you save it. To try it do the following:
- Make sure your iPhone or iPod Touch is updated to version 1.1.3
- Go to your Stafftool (http://yoursubdomain.stafftool.com) in Mobile Safari
- When you’re on your dashboard screen, click the + icon on the bottom bar
- Click the “Add to Home Screen” button
- On the resulting dialog, shorten the name to just “Stafftool” and wait until the image of the dashboard on the icon turns to the Stafftool icon
- Click the “Add” button
You will now have a button that will take you directly to your Stafftool right from the home screen!
When you first start with a new Stafftool account, you’re faced with a somewhat daunting task — filling it up. The main obstacle is filling up the people section with all the people involved with your organization - staff members, congregation, visitors, etc. You probably already have some of these people entered into some sort of existing system, such as your own personal Mac Address Book or Outlook, or in some spreadsheet files spread across a few staff members’ computers. Your main options are to a) type everything in yourself, b) have someone else type everything in, or c) use Stafftool’s people importing tools to do it all automatically. In this post, we’ll go over option c, since that is clearly the preferable choice 
Continue reading ‘Forget Typing - Import Your People Instead’
One of the things I’m most proud of with Stafftool is the iPhone version. I’ve even had a beta tester say he may end up using it more than the normal web interface. As an iPhone user, I’m always really happy to find a version of a tool that I already use that works really well on it, so I naturally wanted to provide one myself with Stafftool. A few of my favorite web apps are the iPhone versions of NewsGator, Twitter, and Facebook. I use the NewsGator and Twitter sites all the time, and even though I’m not a huge Facebook user, like the tester said I probably use the mobile version of it more than the normal site.
I always knew I wanted to do a mobile version of Stafftool and the iPhone was a perfect first step - nice big screen, standards compliant browser with great CSS and Javascript support, and good integration with other services such as the phone and Google Maps. In this post I’m going to go over the features and benefits of the iPhone version, and in a future post I’ll go over how I did it.
This one’s been a long time coming and I’m really excited to introduce it…as we all know, family is a huge part of church life, and keeping track of those family units can be difficult. Up until now, Stafftool has made it easy to specify who’s related to who, but there hasn’t been a way to group those relationships together…until now.
Check this box for them and click update, and that’s all there is to it. If you click on that “View Grouped by Family” button again, you’ll see a new family listing:
Stafftool will automatically list the head of household, their spouse and any children and group them together as a family household. So, all that needs to be done is to make sure that the people in your database have all their relationships set and the heads of households are specified, and everything else just falls into place.
Also, to go along with this, a new relationship type has been added - Roommates. Now, if people from your congregation live together as roommates, they’ll still be listed as a household, just set one of them as the head.
(updated to Primary Household Contact per Bruce’s observation…good call!)
These new family household groupings are perfect for things like snail mail lists - imagine you have a Christmas card you’d like to send out to the congregation. Up until now, that would have meant exporting your database from Stafftool into something like Excel and manually removing the overlapping people who live together. Now, simply go to the family view and export to CSV and every head of household’s information will be exported, ready to mail merge.
Now, there’s a couple things that should be brought to your attention…first, if you have a large database of people and specifying all these heads of households seems like a daunting task, feel free to contact me for assistance. With a few rules specified, I can automatically set every person in your database who doesn’t have any relationships as the head of their household, as well as all the husbands or wives of every spousal relationship, for example. I’ve already done this for one church and it works just fine, so feel free to contact me if you need assistance. Again, this really relies on your relationships being specified and up to date, so if they’re not now’s the time to get them up to speed!
Second, at first I was concerned that this method would create a situation such as a grown adult who is the head of their own household being listed within the household of their parents if they all attend the same church. However, after using it for a bit I realized that this new view serves dual roles - to enable an easy way to create a mailing list or directory of only the information that is shared between family members, but to also visualize the familial relationships that are created between people. For example, although I don’t physically live with my parents and am the head of my own household, I am still rightfully listed as part of their family. However, if a mailing list is exported, we would both still receive the correspondence since we’re both set as the heads of our households. So, it nicely encapsulates both the relationships that exist as well as locational groupings.
Hope this helps you get your congregation even further organized… official launch is almost here, so if you have any thoughts, feedback or questions, please let me know!
Tags: people, families, households, features
I just recently pushed out a few exciting features for Stafftool centered around people and communicating with them. First is the introduction of Smart Groups. If you’ve ever used iTunes and created a smart playlist (all songs i’ve added within the last 2 weeks, all songs I’ve rated 4 stars or higher, etc) you’ve got the idea. You can now create virtual groups of people based on their characteristics such as marital status, age, tags, etc. Even better, they update in real time, so you never have to actually add people to them. Here’s an example of the smart group creation form:
It’s really easy, just name the smart group, choose some available attributes from the dropdown and choose or fill in the detail, and add as many as you’d like to be more fine grained. In this example, we’ll have a virtual group of all people who are married and under 30. You can then show all the people in your database who match these criteria and send them a message, export them to a CSV file to use in another program, or just get a better idea of who makes up your congregation.
Here’s a screenshot of some smart groups that were created by a pastor using Stafftool, so they’re real live, working smart groups:
As you can see, they’re all useful groups to keep tabs on, and really gives you a quick slice of your congregation with the people counts. This, being a church with lots of young people, has a large makeup of single, college aged folks. Any time an event is being planned for young single people, it will be a simple matter of sending a message to the singles smart group, or even creating a new one for single people under 30, if that’s the target group. All of these virtual groups, in addition the the “physical groups” such as ministries and staff groups, make it really easy to stay in communication with both actual ministries as well as specialized demographics. As you can see, it also helps keep on top of peoples’ upcoming birthdays!
The other improvement was to messaging, which received an internal overhaul. The main difference is that, while the previous version displayed all messages within the groups you belong to, the new version actually delivers individual messages to the recipients. This allows users to see if a message has already been read, as well as delete their copy of the message from their inbox.
Staff and the sender can also delete the original message, which will remove all the individually delivered copies as well. In the future, we’ll also be able to tell how many people have read the message, and even who, which will help with seeing how many people are reading your notifications.
Lots more cool stuff coming up on the road to launch, stay tuned!
I just pushed out a new release that added some pretty cool stuff to the People section. There’s now an always-available letter directory bar that lets you filter the users by the first letter of their last name, like an old school rolodex. Also, there’s a new side button available - Export. Click that and you can choose to export the current listing of people in either CSV, vCard or XML formats. If you have the people filtered by group, tag or letter, or any combination thereof, the exports will be the same. Also, it will always filter the whole set of people, even though it only shows 20 to a page in Stafftool. Enjoy!
