iKnow Church isn’t just about the numbers, figures and statistics of church leadership, although they are very important. iKnow Church is also a great tool for helping leaders to keep a finger on the pulse of the pastoral care within your church. One way that it can help you with this is by using Processes.
Processes are automated procedures which aid communication and prompt team members with tasks to complete. An example of this is a follow up process for a new visitor to church. Using iKnow Church, you can set up a process to inform a member of the Welcome Team that a new person has been added to the database. Once informed, this team member can contact the visitor to catch up with them. They can mark that this task has been completed which, in turn, could trigger stage 2 of the process. Each process can be as long or as short as you need it to be.
In order to set up a Process, go to Settings and click Processes.
If you are in the Administrator Role, you will see 2 sections, Global Processes and Local Processes. If you are in any other Role, you will only see the Local Processes.
Global Processes can be set up and used in any location in your iKnow. Local Processes can only be used in the location you set the Process up for.
Click + Global Process, or + Process to begin building a new Process, give it a name and click Save.
Your new process will now be added to the page and you can begin to build it. To do this, click the orange pencil icon alongside the Process.
You now need to decide how you want to trigger this Process.
There are several options, in the Process Trigger dropdown, which you can choose from
Journey Steps - Journey Steps can be customised for your church, so you can use any of them to trigger a process, when they are accomplished.
New Person - This is when a new person is added to the database and the New Person tick box is ticked.
Manual - The process is manually triggered within a person’s profile. This might be related to more circumstantial situations such as expressing a wish to join a serving team.
New Person (via Small Groups) - This is when a person is added to a group through the Attendance tab in Groups.
New Prayer and Praise - The process will be triggered if someone adds a new Prayer and Praise item from their iKnow Dashboard.
New Form Response - The Process will be triggered when someone completes and submits a Custom Form.
The next stage is looking at what we want the process to actually do. Click +Step in the top right of the window.
Give the first step a name. This should be something short and descriptive to explain what the step is. Next, choose who you want to be responsible for this step. You can select an individual, a Team, a Group or a Circle.
For Manually triggered processes, you can also set this as Set to Manual. This would mean that when you manually trigger the process, you can select someone to be responsible for this occurrence of the process. All future steps for this occurrence of the process will also be assigned to that person unless you specify otherwise.
The process will send an email to the person responsible for this stage, so make it clear what you want them to do by adding text under Your Message.
If you have created any email Templates, in Branding, you can set the process to send this email automatically by selecting a Template. So, if this is a new person process, you might want to send an email that thanks the person for coming to church and let them know when and where you regularly meet.
Finally, set whether you want a delay between this process being triggered, the team member being informed and if you want the person responsible for this step to be able to stop the process at this point. Repeat this process to add more stages as needed. Once you have added all your steps, click the Save button at the top right of the page.
If you have created a Global Process, you can click the Share button to specify which locations this Process will be available to. You can also enable Auto Sharing, so if you were to add any new locations, this process would be automatically added to it.
Team members will be made aware of tasks which have been assigned to them by email. However, each church member can have a to do list of multiple tasks. This is also how it is noted that a task has been completed. To access the to do list, each church member can click on My To Dos from the Dashboard.
Once you’ve completed a task, simply click the task name. You will then be able to see contact details of the person, the Contact button which will allow you to contact them through the Communication Suite, the Complete button to mark the task as complete and the Stop this Process button, if Process Stopping has been enabled for this step. If there is one, the next step of the task will be triggered according to the delay set on it, when you click the Complete button, unless you have clicked Stop this Process. The task will then be moved to the My Completed To Dos list.
If a stage of a process is assigned to a Team, Group or Circle, it will appear in the to do list of each member of the Team, Group or Circle. It will be marked as Unassigned until a team member chooses to take responsibility for the task by clicking Assign To Me. This will remove it from everyone else's list and will leave it on the relevant team member’s to do list.
You're also able to see a list of outstanding tasks for others within the Church. You’ll need to go to Settings, then Processes and you'll see an Options tab towards the top of the page. By clicking here, you can set that you want your Network Overseers to see all the to do lists for people in their Groups, or for a particular Circle to see the To Do Lists of everyone in their Campus.
By enabling this option, everyone within the selected Circle or the Network Overseers, will be able to see the To Do lists of those in the relevant Campus or Groups, when they access the My To Dos area of iKnow.
If you need to see how Processes are progressing, you can see an overview of your processes by going to Settings and then Processes.
Click on Processes Summary to see an overview of all Processes which are in progress, or the Summary button, alongside a Process, to see the progress of a specific Process.
Here you can see who is responsible for each task, whether its being worked on or if it’s overdue. You can also generate a PDF should you need this.
By clicking on Completed Tasks, you can see a list of all tasks and processes which have been completed and produce this as a PDF too.