Question

Photo of Ross Li

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Accesing Children Check-In Groups

1

Are the children that got check-in to a class actually put into a group that one can access from the Group Viewer on the internal site? Or they are not actually put into persistent groups? We are wanting to see if we can have some sort of a class list that our children ministry can manage, and possibly do post Sunday communications with parents, including the ones that didn't check-in that past Sunday but is technically part of the class.

Or do I have to create separately groups outside of what the check-in side of things and manually put kids in and out of that roster?

Thanks

  • Photo of Jim Michael

    1

    The check-in groups do not have persistent membership and are only there to do the check-in and take attendance. However, you *can* expose them in the Group Viewer UI by editing their Group Type's Display Options to "Show in Navigation", though this would not help for your needs at all and I don't recommend doing so.


    I think you can do what you want in other ways without creating separate, static groups, though...

    1. Attendance Analytics. These let you do some crazy queries like "Show me everyone in X grade who checked in between this date range and (optionally) didn't check in between these dates." You can then take the resulting grid and click the "Parents of" button to get a grid of their parents... email those results and voila!

    2. Create dataviews/reports that pull in similar information (kids, their grade, their attendance) and maybe use a Dynamic Report block so the various parameters can be adjusted in real time by kids staff. Again, the results are a grid which you can email (and you can get the parents of them via a setting in the underlying dataview).

    The idea in both of these is that instead of a static "here's all the 3rd graders" group you have to manually maintain, you can use dynamic means of querying for these kids and get easier/better results.

    • Ross Li

      Ross Li

      Jim, thanks for this. I think this would work. I've spoken to our children ministry and they are asking about overrides when kids they currently put into a class that doesn't match they school grade or age. I know you can do a check-in override at the kiosk, however that override doesn't get memorized and will need to be done every single time the kid gets checked-in correct?


      We thought of changing their school grade as a work around as a means to do a more permanent override, but just wanted to see if there are other ways to do this.


      Thanks

      • Jim Michael

        Jim Michael

        I think you have the gist of it and have come to the same conclusions we have... you need to check-in a kid and override them each time. To make a kid "permanent override" you would give them a grade that they aren't really in and set the check-in workflow up to work as "check into this grade as long as the grade matches, regardless of age", which is a new ability in v5.