Managing Church Connect Users
Your Connect Page can be used as a stand-alone website, but there's additional functionality available when members or donors create a profile and sign in to your page.
A person who has signed in can view and edit their profile (and the profiles of family members), view a list of upcoming public events, view their giving history, and more. If you use Online Giving, donors who have signed in will be able to set up recurring gifts, securely store cards for future use, give via ACH (e-checks) and give via SMS (text giving). Additionally, when a donor signs in before giving, ChurchTrac automatically updates your Giving screen, assigning the contribution to the correct person in your database.
When a person first visits your Connect or Online Giving page, they'll have the option to create an account. They will be asked to provide their email address to get started. If the person's email address is already associated with a person on your People screen, they will be asked to validate their identity by emailing them a temporary passcode. This person will immediately be able to view and edit their profile and giving history. ChurchTrac automatically matches the registrant to the person on your People screen with the same email address.
If the person provides an email address that does not match an email on your People screen, then we'll prompt the person to "register" before allowing them to log in. They will provide their name, address, and phone number (along with their email).
Once the registrant completes and submits the form, they will automatically be sent a temporary passcode to validate their identity. Since the email this person provided does not match any records on your People screen, you'll need to match them. You can do this from the People screen, or from Settings>Church Connect.
For example, when there's an unmatched registrant, the People screen will prompt you with an alert, like this:
Clicking on this alert will display a dialog with all the registrants that need to be matched. Click the "Match" button for each registrant in the list:
If the name provided by the registrant is a match or close match to a name that already exists in your database, you'll be able to match the registrant to that person. However, if the registrant is new, or there is not matching or similar name already in your database, you can create a new People screen profile for that person.
After you manually match the registrant, or create a new People screen profile for the registrant, they will be able to view and edit their profile and view their own giving history.
Unmatched registrants are still able to give online, the same as a matched registrant. When you open your Giving screen, any donations made by an unmatched donors will display "Unmatched Donor" as the name. However, as soon as you match the registrant (or create a new People screen profile for the registrant), the Giving screen will be updated to show the name of the person who gave.