An Introduction to Tags
Tags are the foundation for organizing your people into groups, managing their needs, and tracking their attendance. A tag is like a label that you apply to a person, and you can create a tag for just about anything. For example, you might want to have a tag to indicate who is a leader, a greeter, a teacher, or who is in a particular Bible study group. You can quickly find names that have a specific tag, or use tags to track a group's attendance.
You can create as many tags as you need, and a person can be assigned to any number of tags. Let's take a look at a real-world example.
Meet Elissa. She has been going to your church for several years. She's an active member that regularly serves in the nursery and occasionally serves as a greeter too. She's the parent of a preschooler, and a stay-at-home mom. She loves cooking and loves singing and and is in a Bible study group (If only everyone were as involved as Elissa, right?) Here's what Elissa's tags might look like:
How does this information help you? For one, you can see a person's complete involvement in your church at a quick glance. You might even say that tags help you to know your people better! Tags enable you to see who is plugged into your ministry and identify people before they fall through the cracks. Tags also help you to identify how people are gifted and how they want to serve.
Let's suppose you have an event coming up and need people to play worship music. A quick search of your database shows that Elissa can play the keyboard. You can quickly reach out to her (and others that have the Worship Team tag) and recruit a team of volunteers for your event.
Also, Elissa's bible study teacher uses the Discipleship Group tag to keep track of attendance at their weekly group meeting. If she misses a couple of weeks in a row, the leader knows to reach out to make sure everything is okay.
All this is possible with tags. When we take the time to assign tags to Elissa, we can know her better, and we can help her to stay connected to the church body. We can see how to serve her and her family while also knowing how to let her exercise her gifts and abilities. After all, a church isn't a building; it's the people. When we know our people, the church can move in BIG ways!
In a nutshell:Tags are a foundational feature of ChurchTrac and you will use them A LOT.