The Shortlist: August 2020

I don’t even know how to tell you how hard I’ve worked or how it lights a fire inside of me or how committed I am to making sure these apps continue to surprise and delight you and help you and your ministries flourish.

This was from my Dear pastors, I made this for you. posts on Instagram on Twitter.

Since sharing about the new apps and the fire inside of me, I’ve been getting questions about what kind of features are coming?

So here’s the short list of what’s right around the corner.

COVID Exposure Smart Filter

This is a pretty essential addition at this point. The idea is that you select one person and then the filter looks through the database and gets all of the events that they’ve attended in the last 2 weeks and creates a list of all people that were also at those events.

Anyone can do this manually right now by looking at Events on a person’s detail screen and then going to the Groups tab and creating smart groups for the single events that person was at, but for the foreseeable future, this seems like a great addition to help make sure we are able to quickly alert others if they were potentially exposed at in-person ministry events.

The Feed

For years I have thought about creating some sort of dashboard so that the first screen you load isn’t just the list of people. In discussions with other pastors that use MinHub, we talked about how there needs to be a better way to surface ministry moments that have been recorded.

Instead of just creating a Ministry Moments section in the app, I came up with this idea that borrows from all of the social media type feeds that we see in those apps. But instead of random cat videos and less-than-reputable “news” stories posted by relatives we haven’t talked to in years, a feed of what is coming up in your ministry and what has happened recently.

For upcoming, we can see the next event in your different event types and potentially see the list of those that have RSVP/signed up for the event. (This is another item on the shortlist below.) We also want to see upcoming birthdays–so today, tomorrow, this week sections of people that are about to have birthdays which is always a great time to reach out to your people.

Then starts the feed of past events. This would include recently recorded ministry moments and events that have passed with some quick stats, a short cut to reports and quicklook just like in the event details screen and a section for notes to debrief events. Notes for Events are already in the Groups app but need to be added to the others.

There is a bit of figuring out permissions here. I’m thinking that ministry moments will show in the feed if you are a Feed Admin or if you created the ministry moment. That way, if there are any personal details in the ministry moment that shouldn’t be broadcasted to people that aren’t connected to those in the ministry moment, it’s not being shown to every leader with access to the app.

RSVP / Sign Up for Events

Sometimes it makes sense to allow people to sign up and be able to track that ahead of time for events. This isn’t too technically challenging and could be a big benefit to ministries, so adding this to the short list.

You could conceivably sign people up much like taking attendance ahead of time.

Also looking into implementing a way to attach events to announcements in Portal so that people who are on Portal can RSVP themselves or other members of their family for events. This is especially helpful to be able to plan for volunteers when it comes to scheduling Kid’s Ministry volunteers for large events or just tracking interest in events. It could be as specific as actual registration for events as well (like going to summer camp or a men’s retreat).

Refactor Stats into the Events Page

While sometimes helpful, the Stats page in the Youth app has been the least utilized tab of all the screens. To make room for some other features, I’m going to incorporate stats into the Events tab and show graphs for event attendance beneath the event types (and rework the design for the event types).

This will help you easily see any huge drops in attendance for different types to see if you need to make any modifications to ministry strategy.

Ministry Training

One of the huge values of investing in MinHub Sync has been the ability to empower volunteers to care for people in your ministry. Attendance is helpful in tracking who shows up at events and ministry moments close the loop to get information back to pastors about what is happening in the ministry.

Empowering volunteers with the app has been recording ministry moments, keeping the database updated and helping with some of the ministry tracking stuff.

But there is a huge opportunity here in ministry training that I just have to build.

Think of it as the little How-To’s in ministry. On an extremely basic level, you get to add some blocks to create a lesson. That might be a title, some text, a couple images, a short video, and a couple of follow up questions to make sure the lesson was adequately understood.

You could then create a series of these that would become a full onboarding course.

Like these are all the things we expect of our small group leaders and you create a How-To for each expectation. Or all of the things you need to learn to be part of the Sound & Lights Team. Or what it means to disciple someone in a one-to-one relationship for your church. Or even all of the things that are expected of you when you join the church board. The possibilities are really endless.

Then, your leaders that are connected in your ministry apps can go through the courses when they have time, and pastors and ministry leaders can see which of their people have completed the trainings for when you need to staff something or someone asks to be a part of a team.

This is an amazing opportunity to create a leadership pipeline for all of your ministries where you can teach it once and then all of your leaders can learn when they are able, which in the age of Coronavirus and not always being able to gather has become more important than ever.

Short List Disclaimer – None of these features will for sure make it into the apps. They are my current ideas that I am working on. Sharing them here is part of being transparent about the work of being an app maker. There may be technical challenges that make these less likely to make it into production that I won’t know until later. But celebrating any of these ideas and helping make them better by reaching out on social media is always welcome.