Subject: Touchpoint NewsLetter, September 2016

TouchPoint Newsletter
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This newsletter contains tips, information about new features, and announcements of upcoming events. See past newsletters.

Summer is almost over! We have just a few more days left before the season changes and with it will come fall programming! For many of you, this will be one of the busiest times of the year. You will offer new Wednesday night classes, new day-time classes for Women, new recreation teams, fall get-away trips, conferences, and more. 

TouchPoint is here to help you manage all of that. Most of these are perfectly suited for online registrations. Those registrations are more efficient than paper forms. Once you learn how to set up your registrations, you will never want to return to paper! 

Check out our help articles and videos that walk you through the process of creating these registrations. Whether you just want people to enroll in a class or you have complex requirements, payment options, and more, TouchPoint online registrations will help you manage these so you can spend more time ministering to people. 

What you might have missed

New iPad Check-In App 

We introduced this new app in a blog post on August 16. The publication of this app was the completion of a project that first presented an Android Check-In App. So, now TouchPoint Check-In is totally mobile. We still our have original PC version as well. 

Advanced Search for Organizations 

In June, we told you about a really nice feature that allows you to search for organizations using all sorts of criteria in addition to the usual drop down options. We allow you to search for orgs with specific Extra Values, for the org’s hierarchy (child of or master org), as well as by any of the registration settings. Because this is a whole list of items, this feature warranted its own help article. 

Batch Process to Create Sub-Groups 

This new feature was mentioned in a July blog post and is a huge time-saver if you have multiple orgs that all need sub-groups of the same name. We used it to create sub-groups to help us track Bible memory information in classes from 4 year olds through 3rd grade. That was a lot of orgs, so creating the sub-groups one time in a spreadsheet and then importing them using a batch process was wonderful.

SQL Recipes

We have steadily been adding more recipes in order to make it easy for your System Admin to copy a script from our help articles and paste into your database to create a myriad of new reports. We post these recipes in the Programming TouchPoint section of our Help Documentation. We have SQL Recipes and Python Recipes. Here are some of our more recent scripts:

View Code in Search Builder 

In August, we also told you about a new feature in Search Builder that allows you to view the code in a new format. I have found this very helpful when I have more complex (or just long) searches. I can see the orgs, divisions, member types, etc. without having to click on each Condition. This was added to TouchPoint because that code can be used when creating Python scripts once you build your search.

Registration History & Summary Reports for Admins 

These 2 reports have been in the database for a number of months, but we just got around to presenting them to you in a blog post about a month ago. The history report is a list of every registration whether it was ever completed or not. The summary gives you a count of how many registrations you have by description. There are other features that are part of these reports, so they are definitely worth looking into if you are a System Admin on your database.

Recreation Teams Made Easy

We have found that a big draw to get people from our community involved in something is to offer sports teams - for both children and adults. These teams and activities are a way to minister and get to know people who might not otherwise visit your church. It is also a way for our members to interact and build relationships with these people, as well as to enjoy the fitness aspect. So, they are definitely about ministry, not just sports. Because of the ministry side of recreation, we wanted to help our staff maximize their time when building teams. We have a feature that does just that! If you work in recreation you should read about this.

Want to stay up-to-date on the latest happenings at TouchPoint? Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

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We do post and tweet things about TouchPoint and the latest features that you might find interesting. So, please click the icons above and stay informed. In fact, if there is some sort of outage with our service, twitter is the place to stay tuned to our progress in addressing the issue.

Blessings,
Your TouchPoint Team


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