You may have noticed something new in BVCMS called  Organization Type. It shows up on Organization Search, on an Organization page itself, and also in Query Builder . We added this feature to give you more flexibility in identifying various Organizations based on the function of the Organization, not just the Program and Division. BVCMS uses Organizations for everything from classes to committees to camps to certifications to singers to soccer teams to…well, you get the picture. Organizations are used for all sorts of stuff! So, having a way to sort them by their function is pretty cool.

Some possible Types for Organizations would be as follows:

Class - for Sunday School, small groups, discipleship groups

Event - conferences, workshops, any kind of special event

Trip - camps, mission trips, senior adult trips

Volunteer - for all your ushers, valet parking attendants, nursery workers

Committee - for committees (duh!)

You decide what works best for your church. Maybe you just want to 'type' them very broadly by using types such as  Education,  Service and Fellowship to distinguish between groups in which a person is receiving teaching (Sunday School, small groups) - Education; groups in which they are doing some type of service for others (Ushers, Mission Trip volunteers) - Service; and groups designed for interaction (camps, trips, ball teams) - Fellowship .

Think about how you will use this before you start creating the Organization Types. You may not need this feature. However, churches will a lot of Organizations will greatly benefit from it.

Once you have created the Organization Types and assigned them to the appropriate Organizations, then what? Glad you asked! Now you can filter for specific Org Types on Organization Search . You can query for individuals enrolled in a specific Type of Organization . Also, on a person's Enrollment list, you will see that we group Organizations by Type in the list of Active Enrollments . So you can tell at a glance the kinds of Organization in which a person is involved.

Read more about Organization Types and how to create them.