I recently took my son to the Children’s Museum in Waco, Texas, while there visiting my sister. It is an incredible museum full of all sorts of exhibits for anyone in that area! There was a variety of different rooms where the children could explore and learn from live animals to international dress up clothes to climbing on trucks. One of the favorite areas was a room based on communication. This had tables where they could work with stamps for Hieroglyphics or even braille. On the side was a display of typewriters. What?! I couldn’t believe it. I’m quite familiar with those! What are they doing in a history of communication exhibit?! To my further amusement, my son was fascinated by all of them. He loved all of the keys and gadgets. The typewriter that I remember my mom being excited about when I was a child and helping type elementary school documents was there on display. What’s new today can be gone tomorrow!
This display made me think of all of the different ways communication really has changed in the past few years. To help the church stay up to date with all of these changes, we released a new tab for the Profile record in ACS Version 10.4. This is the Contact Information tab. This lets you keep all of this information for your church goers at one easily accessible place. You can keep their Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Website, CaringBridge, or any other social media information. You can track whether or not they have signed up for text messaging with your organization. You can also keep track of how they preferred to be contacted. If people don’t know about all of the events you have going on, how can they be there? This will help you stay better in touch with them!
Also, there is communications preference list. This will allow you to create a list of topics that you communicate about. In the next release of Access ACS, the member can then select their own preferences. So, a grandparent with grandchildren at the church or another church might wish to receive all of the emails from the children’s department on what is going on so they can participate. An individual without children might not want to be bothered with what that ministry is doing.
It is exciting all of the communication avenues that are available for us to reach out to people as well as stay connected to them. Who knows where to next!
When will the new version of Access ACS be released? Excited about these new communication tools.
We are hard at work on this release. It includes some exciting features with communication as well as partial payments for events. We are hoping to have this to you in August.