Basic Configuration
It is important that your ChurchSuite account is setup in a way that GHC Trends is able to recognise. Ensure the following is in place.
Members
This is central to our church health design. GHC needs to be able to differentiate who is a member of your church and who is not yet (i.e. a newcomer). We think it best to simply answer the question: does this person call your church home?
Use Tags to assign various categories of people. Members are designated by being assigned a Tag that ends in “_” (underscore). For example: Regulars, Members_, Core_, Committed_
GHC Trends records the number of “Members” each week so you can see the changes in your membership as well as how engaged your members are.
Exclusions
Configure the Tags that you assign to excluded people..
GHC Trends ignores any person assigned a Tag that ends in “*” (asterisk) (eg Visitors*, External Contacts*, Non-attending Parent of Youth*)
People Category/Membership Type
Create Tags in a Tag Category named People Category or Membership Type and assign them to people. Counts will be recorded against each Tag value.
Place a number at the beginning of the description of each of your people category tags to order them.
Demographics
By default there are 2 Demographics : all contacts are Adults, all children are Children.
For more granularity, create Tags in a Tag Category named Demographics and assign them to people. Any tags assigned to people will be used as the demographic. If no Tag is assigned, the default Adult/Child will be used.
Professions
Configure a Key Date named Date Professed.
GHC Trends records the number of people professed each week. Professions are recorded by creating a Key Date named Date Professed and recording the date for the person.
Groups
No special configuration is required.
GHC Trends records the number of Small Groups and the people in them each week, both as a total and as a separate count for each Cluster. Group members assigned the role of leader will be counted as Leaders. The number of people in each role will be counted.
Leaders
Create a Tag named “Leaders” and assign it to people (usually volunteers) who serve in leadership roles.
These are typically leaders of other adults or “Leaders of Leaders”. Group leaders are automatically counted as leaders so this tag is not needed for them.
Staff
Create a Tag named “Staff” and assign it to people who work at church.
For part-time staff, use a Tag with the % of time appended eg assign a Tag named “Staff50” for someone who works half-time.
Rostered Serving
The ChurchSuite API doesn’t currently report roster data.
Service Attendance
ChurchSuite does not record the time of day of services for which attendance is recorded.
To distinguish between services at different times, ensure that the name of each Gathering includes the service time in it (eg 9am Service). Many formats are supported : h, hh:mm, hh:mm a . eg ( Church @9, 10:30 Service, Early Church 7:30 am )
GHC Trends reports attendance breakdown for Metrics whose names start with Adult, Child and Guest as well as the Total attendance at a Gathering. Other Metrics are recorded but not reported in dashboards currently.
Start Date
The date people are added to ChurchSuite is important to some metrics (eg Visitor Ratio, Freshness). ChurchSuite tries to preserve the added date when importing from another ChMS. If this was not preserved, the whole church appears as newcomers with a recent added date. To exclude people in such an import, under Account create a User Group named GHC Start Date. In that group in the From Name field, put a date that’s after the import from which added people are considered to be genuine newcomers in YYYY-MM-DD format (eg 2024-11-22).
Authorise Access
This section describes the setup tasks if you are using ChurchSuite as your ChMS.
GHC Trends connects as an OAUTH API Integration to your ChurchSuite account. The following steps will authorise access to your ChurchSuite data from GHC Trends. The steps can only be carried out by a User of your ChurchSuite account with Administrator access and only need to be done once.
1: Create a user for authorising.
This is recommended to be able to set permissions finely and to minimise the impact of the person changing or leaving in future.
Login to ChurchSuite as an Administrator level User, click on your profile icon in the top right, and then click "Settings [Administrator]".
Select the Users tab, click [+ Add user] to create a new user
Enter these details for new user:
- Username : GHC.Data.Access
- Email: An email address you can access (use your own for now)
- Site: All Sites
- Type: Administrator
- Communication: Unrestricted
- Check: Send Welcome Email
Click [Save]
Log out, check the email address you entered for the new user and open the Welcome to ChurchSuite message.
Click the [Set your password] button, set a password for the new user, and login (you may need to setup MFA)
2 Authorise GHC Trends
Use the following button to authorise.
[ghc_authorise_button]
Click 'Authorize GHC Trends' and then Login to your Churchsuite when prompted using the GHC.Data.Access user created above.
Click Allow to approve access to your data.
When complete you will be instructed to close the windows.
(If you get a message that the authorisation has not succeeded, you will need to return to step 2 above.)
3. Loading data
Trends data from your ChurchSuite will now begin processing. This can day hours or days. You will be notified when the initial load has completed. Be sure to setup basic configuration in next step so that data is processed correctly.
Once you have completed the above click done below. We will then created a saved link for trends in your myGHC page. However it takes time to scrape the data. You'll be able to see the progress of this in myGHC and we'll also send you an email when it's fully completed.