The Problem

Our Congregational Care Coordinator would receive information from various ministries in our church who were checking on members who might be sick, having an operation, recovering from a hospitalization, or lost a loved one; this information was then placed in a Congregational Care (Pastoral) note by the Congregational Care Coordinator so the touch or visit could be documented. To make the job of our Congregational Care Coordinator easier, we needed a way for the members of the various ministries making the touches/visits to add Congregational Care (Pastoral) notes to members' profiles without having internal database access.

The Solution

A form was placed on our external site that allows ministry teams to enter their care notes without having access to our database; this note is added to the member’s profile on the internal side as a Congregational Care (Pastoral) note (the page is not listed on the site, so the URL is needed to access it and the page requires the user to login to their account).

How-To

Create a workflow with the following attributes:

1. Member (field type: Person)
2. Note (field type: Memo)
3. Reported By: (field type: Text)
4. Your Ministry: (field type: Text)
5. Report Summary (field type: Memo)

Under the Start Activity, enable person entry in the form (this will get saved as the Member). To make things easier for our team, besides the person's name, the only other fields shown are the email address and phone number entry. I created a separate header called "Care Information" in the pre-HTML of the note entry on the form to distinguish between the member information and the care note information. 

Under the Continue Activity, after persisting the workflow, set the summary using the Lava Run. This summary include the note and can contain the person's name and the ministry they represent; save the summary as the "Report Summary" attribute. Use the "Person Note Add" to add the note to the person's profile (the text of the note will be the workflow attribute containing the "Report Summary".

After saving the workflow, create a page on your external site and add a workflow entry block; select the new workflow in the block settings (the page that we have is not displayed in the page menu and requires the person to log in to access it). When the person fills out the form and submits it, the note they entered will now appear on the person's page. It will also have their name as the person who created the note, hence requiring them to log in.

I hope this helps another church who is looking for a solution to allow ministry leaders (or those without internal access) add notes to members' profiles.