Organizations for Recurring Events
This article was originally posted in Dec. 2010. This was long before the name change from BVCMS to TouchPoint. However, the information contained is still relevant to managing organizations today and the link to the help article has been updated.
We got this question from Clint, a new user on BVCMS. Thought we'd take the opportunity to blog the answer for the community of new BVCMS users.
"Twice a year we teach Dynamic Marriage. Those classes would be their own 'group'. So, we'd have something like DM-2010Jan and DM-2010Jul for example. But we also want to have an "alumni" group that has everyone that's ever taken a class, which will be a kind of life-group. How do I accomplish this?"
My suggestion for the group you mentioned would be to create an organization by copying an existing one & renaming it - don't get bogged down worrying about the Program or Division for now. Those are easy to change and setup later. The organization will be your 'group'. I would name it just Dynamic Marriage. There is no need to create one for each semester. Then enroll those who are participating in the upcoming class. You then create Meetings each week (or how ever often you meet) & mark those present who attend. This creates a history for you.
Once the class ends, I am assuming it runs for a few weeks or months , you drop all the participants. They will all show up on the Previous Members tab in the organization. This allows you to keep up with everyone who has been part of the group/class, plus you have a record of how many times they attended.
Later, when you want to find everyone who has ever attended the class, you can either go to the Previous Tab of the Organization, or you could also build a query.everyone who was a Member of that Organization (class) during a specified date range. You can even look for previous members based on how many times they attended during a given date range.
We use this same model for things like Student Winter Camp, which happens only once a year. We enroll everyone, then we drop them after camp. Then we re-use that organization for the next year's camp.
You can even re-create history if you have all the data from your previous classes. Once you create the organization, just enroll everyone who participated the first time you had the class. Create each of the meetings, record the attendance, then drop everyone. Then enroll those who participated the next time you had the class & create those meetings.
Even if you only have a headcount & don't know specifically who attended each meeting, you can create a Headcount Meeting which allows you to enter the number without having to mark specific individuals present.
It is very easy to Drop all members at one time.there's an article in the Help File about how to do that - Drop Members