Our standard Promotion routine is designed to be simple and straightforward. We recommend this as the best practice for managing promotion.
However, if you have more complicated promotion rules that prevent you from using the automated routine, the following steps guide you through an alternative promotion approach. This approach is sometimes preferred by churches with a "Sunday school" model (Groups based around a progression of classes not always tied to age or grade).
The following steps should be done the week of promotion (immediately before the first Sunday when Check-in will be used). If you are using the same Groups (that is, not end-dating Groups), and you want to work ahead, you can setup each class with new sets of future Group Participants with a future start date and update the current Group Participants with future end dates.
- Clear all unsaved selections on Group Participants and Participants pages.
- Open a Current Group from Groups page.
- Select the desired Current Group Participants.
- Click Xfer - choose the "Participants" page (not "Group Participants) and name the selection for the group it is promoting to. So, if you opened the 4th grade group, you'll want to name it 5th grade group).
- Repeat steps 3-5 for all Group Participants that need to be promoted.
- End date the current Group Participants using one of the following approaches:
- Use the same Groups: Go to the Group Participants page. Search for and select the records of all the children, students or volunteers who need to be moved to another group. Use the mass assign button to give them an end date.
- Use the same Groups: You can also end date any groups you are working with. This will add an end date to all of the Group Participants. You can then edit the Group record, remove the end date and move on.
- Create new Groups. You may also want to end date all of the groups and create new ones.
- Go to the first Group you are ready to add the promoted kids/students to. Click "Add" find your appropriate selection from step 4 and assign them to the Group with an appropriate start date (before your next check-in event).
- Clear your Selection from step 4 on the Participants Page.
- Repeat steps 7-8 for each Group.
Tip: Use the same Date and time as the End Date when end dating Group Participants as part of Promotion. That way you can quickly find all the records and can identify that the end dating was related to promotion (not moving, leaving or other circumstances).
Communication
If you need to create a mail merge document for communicating with parents about the upcoming promotion:
- Go to the Groups Page.
- Select the Groups.
- Click Reports > Selected Group Parent Email List.
- Select the "Summary Type" option "One per Group Member".
- Click View Report.
- Save results to Excel or Comma Delimited.
