Many of your organization's strategies are about helping people move from one state to another. Often this movement isn't a straight line, but more of a meandering path. When the path takes an extended period of time it's possible for people to fall through the cracks. This is where the Connections tool comes to our rescue. While workflows can be a great help by connecting people through automated processes, they can quickly become complicated and unwieldy in complex situations. The Connections tools provide a backbone that allows you to build advanced processes. As you'll soon see, workflows still play an important role in Connections but more so as an extension of the foundation instead of the foundation itself. But enough talk... let's see for ourselves what the Connections feature can do. 10,000 Foot View of Connections When we started to work on the Connections features, we were trying to solve a specific problem: connecting people who want to serve. As we progressed through the ideation process, we started to see that this specific problem was really a reoccurring pattern inside of an organization. What we mean is, these features could be used in lots of different ways. With that realization we made the tool to be configurable for many different types of connection processes. Out of the box it's configured for a single Involvement (fancy term for serving) process, but we encourage you to build your own connection processes. You're not on your own, though; we'll show you how later. In most connection processes the goal will be to take a person who wishes to be connected to a high-level Opportunity and walk them through a series of steps or activities until they can be connected to a specific group. This will make more sense if we look at an example. Let's consider the Involvement connection type. Connection Type - Remember that you can create as many connection types as you want. Each type should represent a specific organizational process.Connection Opportunities - Each connection type can have numerous opportunities. In the involvement type these opportunities would be the high-level ministry areas where someone might be interested in serving (Ushers, Greeters, Parking Lot, Children's, etc.).Connection Requests - As people enter the connection process a Opportunity Connectors - Each opportunity will have a group of connectors (staff members, team leaders, etc.) that work with the individual request through the connection process. As you'll see, next they can generate multiple activities and change the status of the request as they move the individual through the process.Placement Groups - The goal in many connection processes is to ultimately get the person to a specific group. For the involvement process this may be a serving team, but other connection types could place someone in a specific small group. Okay, now that we've seen all the components of a connection process, let's learn a bit more about the lifecycle of a request. Requests have a couple of different properties that allow us to describe their current state and see a history of previous activities. Each of these properties is discussed below. State The state of a request describes the standing of the request. There are only four options for state: Active: The request is currently being worked.Inactive: The request has either been completed or canceled.Future Follow-up: Often requestors will need more time before they are ready to be fully connected. The future follow-up state allows us to Connected: The request has completed the full connection process. Status You can define as many different statuses as you'd like for a request. These statuses are defined for each connection type. The statuses that have been configured for the Involvement connection type include: No Contact: This is the initial status of a request. It basically means nothing has been done with the request.In Progress: Once a connector has been assigned and communication has been attempted, then the status should be changed to Remember you can customize these statuses and add your own. For instance, you could have a status for In Training or Complete. You can automate the process of moving individuals from one status to another. See the Automating Status Changes section below for details. Activities Activities are a listing of events that have occurred during the process of connecting the requestor. You can customize what these activities are. The involvement connection type is pre-configured with the following activities: Called: A phone call was made, and the requestor answered.Called Left Message: Pretty much says it all.Called No Answer: You can probably figure this one out too.Contacted Waiting for Response: Some type of contact was made, and the request is waiting for a reply. While each request will only have one value for state and status, they can have as many activities as needed. Now that we understand the properties of requests, let's see them in action. New Connection - Sara Simmons makes a request from the website to get connected into the ushers opportunity. From this, a new connection request is created with the State of Active and the Status of No Contact. Also note that at this point no Connector is assigned. In Progress - After seeing it, Alisha Marble assigns herself to the new request and makes a first attempt at contact with the requestor. Unfortunately, Sara was at her daily spin class and missed the call. At this point, Alisha changes the status of the request to Future Follow-up - In a few days, Alisha tries calling again and this time is able to reach Sara. After talking, Sara decides that it might be best to wait four weeks until things settle down at the hospital where she works. Alisha now changes the state to Future Follow-up with a follow-up date of 9/15. At this point the request will be hidden from her list of requests until 9/15. Connected - On 9/15 the request pops back up on Alisha’s radar and she makes another call to Sara. During this call they conclude that Ushering at the noon services makes the most sense for Sara's schedule. Alisha then connects her to the group and marks the request Connected. Picks Group - As a part of the Connected step, Alisha picks the group to connect Sara to. While the connection process doesn't have to always end with placing someone in a group, it will in most cases. Workflow - We promised you workflows and here's a taste of them. Workflows can be set up to automatically launch when certain conditions of the request are met. In this case a workflow was defined to launch whenever someone was Connected that sends out some training materials. We'll look more at workflows soon. The Role of Campus Campus plays an important role in the connection process, particularly for multi-campus sites. As requests come in, they will be attached to a campus. Also, the connectors and assigned connection groups can be partitioned by campus. We'll see how to set this up later. For now, just know that the connection opportunities can be shared for all campuses while still providing support for campus-specific requests. Spotting Connections a Mile Away Connection requests are shown prominently on the person profile page to help give you an overview of a person's connection at a glance. Each connection request listed on the profile page lists the connection type, opportunity, campus and status. You can edit the settings on this block to choose which connection requests to show based on their State.