Churches often reach out to various regions of their city and organise their leadership structures around these different regions. This article will help you set up the region settings in GoDoChurch.
Note: use of regions in GoDoChurch is not mandatory. If your church is small and currently only reaches out to one area, then you can leave it as a single region - we suggest that you do change the name to something appropriate to your ministry.
Overview of regions
A region is a geographical area to which your church reaches out. The region setting is used in two modules in GoDoChurch: Follow Up and Groups. Every person added to the Follow Up module and every small group added to the system is assigned to a specific region.
Note: Be careful not to confuse ‘suburb' with ‘region’. A suburb is something automatically set by Google when you add address info for a person or small group. Regions are geographical areas that you decide on and set within GoDoChurch. A region will probably contain many suburbs. Suburbs are not customisable, but regions are fully customisable.
What are the main benefits of using regions?
Statistics: you can use the Folllow Up and Groups modules to draw statistics on regions. For example, how many of your first-time visitors came from a specific region, or what kind of small group growth have you seen in one specific region?
Communication: you can message all group members/leaders who have been assigned to a specific region.
Keeping leaders informed: you can set up GoDoChurch to notify region co-ordinators of changes to follow up records or small groups under their care.
Setting up regions in GoDoChurch
To create a region:
Open the regions settings menu: Settings >> Database Settings >> Region Settings.
To add a new region click Add New Region.
Fill in the relevant info for region coordinator, region name, and description.
Next, specify the notification settings for the coordinator.
Notify co-ordinator when assigned follow up records change: We recommend leaving this box un-ticked. If it is ticked the coordinator for that region will be notified whenever a change is made to ANY follow up records assigned to their region - even records that have been assigned to someone else for follow up.
Notify co-ordinator when assigned group records change: Again, we recommend leaving this box un-ticked. If it is ticked the coordinator for that region will be notified whenever a change is made to ANY small groups assigned to their region.
Make this region available for follow up: if you would like to add a region but don’t want follow up records to be added to it, then un-tick this box. In most circumstances you will leave the box ticked.
Make this region available for groups: if you would like to add a region but don’t want any groups to be added to it then un-tick this box. In most circumstances, you will leave the box ticked.
Regions and leadership structures
As mentioned earlier, use of regions is not required in GoDoChurch. If your church leadership structure is organised around age groups rather than regions, then you might find you don’t need to use regions at all. For example, some churches have pastors/leaders who oversee all the youth or all the young adults in the church irrespective of where they are based. Where this is the case, small group oversight and follow up responsibilities tend to also be organised around age group, with the youth pastor, for example, being responsible for all youth orientated small groups in the church. If this is the case in your church then consider ignoring the regions setting and instead focus on the age profile setting in follow up and groups. The Metrics, Follow Up, and Groups modules all work perfectly fine without utilising the regions settings.
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