You can find the help files in the Follow up Module here. This article deals with the specific setup required for follow up with your visitors in a case study format. A Follow up process can be a simple or a complicated as is needed in your context. We suggest you begin simple and then add steps as is needed to get your Visitors/people where you need them to be.
We also strongly suggest putting your process on paper, documenting every step and search that needs to be completed and the following through with that successfully before adding other steps.
Context
Our church is opening up after Covid-19 lockdown and we have new people visiting our church in our Sunday morning service. We have 2 services, and a specific point person who is responsible for the follow up of visitors. We want visitors to complete a form and then receive an SMS from the church and a phone call from one of our small group leaders inviting them to a small group.
Setup in the Follow Up Feature
We want to make sure that we have set up the following structures in our Follow Up module.
- Reason - Setup or edit the New Visitor/Visitor reason for our church context
- Location - Setup where this visitor has originated, This could be a morning service, evening service, community, outreach event. This is something generic enough that can be used for various reasons.
- Region - This is set up under our Database Settings and not in the Follow up module but is very useful to set up. Regions refer to pastorates or geographical areas that are overseen by a specific person. Practically, you can assign an overseer to a pastorate/region and if the region is selected when creating a record, this overseer will get notifications of follow up activity in his region. This is useful when we have a person overseeing all visitors, or if we have different overseers who need to stay up to date with activity in their different pastorates.
Weekly Setup for Sunday
Step 1: Create your electronic follow up form
By clicking on Follow Up Web Page, you can add in the below settings to create a specific form to capture our Morning Service visitors. If you need more info on the specific fields you can read Create Digital Follow-up Forms:
I can create a similar unique form for the Sunday Evening Service, by clicking on the Follow Up Web Page and setting up the form again, but this time pre-loaded with the Evening service as Location and the Evening service visitor Coordinator assigned on this form.
NOTE: Each form will have a unique link that can be re-used again if you saved it somewhere. If you haven't saved it, you can just recreate the form with the same field to create it again. You can create as many unique forms as is needed in your context and the forms can be as generic or as specific as needed.
Step 2: Distribute the form
When you click on Launch, a web page will open with an input-only form. As next step, I copy the link and put it into Bitly.com (a URL shortener) and save it somewhere where I can easily find it again.
I also make this shortened link available to anyone who will help to capture the visitors' information, like my hosting team or the people manning my info desk.
On the Sunday
My hosting team opens the link I have sent them on their own phones or on a tablet at the info desk. They can then electronically capture the visitors' information into records which are assigned to the Follow-up coordinator assigned on the Configure Web Page window shown above.
On the Monday
Each record/person captured via the link is now a record in my Follow up module and a profile in my database. Each record is assigned to the coordinator indicated when we created the form.
Step 1: Send the Welcome SMS
As the administrator, I will go to my Follow up Module and then search for all Visitors for the morning service and then send them an SMS to welcome them to church and telling them to expect a follow up call later the week. This step can also be assigned to Bob our assigned Follow Up Coordinator for this form.
My search:
- Reason: Visitors
- Status: New
- Location: Morning Service
Once I click Search I will be able to message everyone who needs to be followed up from that screen:
This will populate the Messaging module with my new visitors so I can send them that welcome message.
During the Week
Step 1: Follow Up coordinator re-assigns the record to a Small Group Leader
Bob TheBaker is our follow up coordinator. He will also log into the Follow up Module and do the same search for all the new visitors as above.
For each record, he will update the point person from himself to one of the small group leaders. He can do this by clicking on Action>>Edit for the record he wants to update.
The small group leader will then be responsible for the rest of the follow up process as communicated to our small group leaders.
Once Bob has re-assigned all the records to small group leaders he can send them an SMS to remind then to give the visitors a call to invite them to Life Group before Wednesday of the same week.
Step 2: Small Group leaders invite visitors to Life Group with a phone call and gives feedback on the outcome.
Small group leaders will get an email with the person they are to follow up's information. Let's take Bella as our small group leader for this example. Once she has contacted Lindi and Simon, our visitors above, she is going to login to GoDoChurch, go to the Follow up module and search for all records assigned to her.
Once she has a list off all records assigned to her she can click on Action>>Edit to update Simon Barito's record.
She is going to update any information that she can, but most importantly, she is going to update the Status of this record and the Notes section:
- The status will be changed to Closed if she contacted him, invited him to Life Group and he indicated a willingness to attend. This she will indicate in the Notes section.
- If however, she didn't manage to contact him and she needs to follow up again, she will indicate this in the Notes section and mark the Status field as In progress.
Step 3: Next Steps for the Small group leader:
- Simon indicated a willingness to attend Life Group and integrate into the church, Bella will then add him to her Life Group in the Groups Module and treat him as an incoming member of her group.
- If in the phone call it comes out that Simon selected the wrong region when completing the form, meaning that he should have been assigned to another small group leader, Bella can re-assign him back to the coordinator or the correct Small group leader for further follow up.
- If Simon really is just a visitor to our church with no intention of coming back (E.g. his is just visiting his extended family and came to church with them), Bella marks the record as Closed and indicates the reason in the Notes section.
Managing my Follow up responsibilities as a Coordinator/Church Administrator
As an admin or a coordinator, I need to keep my finger on the pulse regarding my follow up responsibilities.
For this, I will make use of the search functionality and create searches that I run weekly to see what is going on in my records.
I can search for all the 'Morning Service+Visitor' records. This search will give me all the records, New, In progress and Completed. I can then sort the Status column and have a list of all my new records, In Progress and Completed records. as below.
The aim is to only have New records from this week, and In progress records from 2 weeks ago at most.
I can also search for all the In Progress records across all regions and all reasons and locations. I would then message all the Point people to please complete the follow up and update the record on the admin system.
I can click on the Notes button at the end of each record to view the notes added by a point person to that record. This is especially handy when working through In progress and Closed records.
Note: A point person needs an Executive permission level to access follow up records.
If you need any help with the practical execution of one of these steps you can refer to our Help files: