Rock U - People - Following

Transcribed Video Content

So let's talk about a feature called following within Rock. What following does is allows you to track specific users and just kind of see the activity that's happening on the record. Things have they been baptized, was their birthday coming up, have they joined a certain type of group. So let's go ahead and check it check out these features. The first thing you need to do is you actually need to start following people And one of the simplest ways to do that is on the person profile page, just to click, in this upper left hand corner of a person and follow them. So when it's dark this, that means that you're following the person. If you click it again, it kinda goes transparent. So in this case, we are following Ted Decker. So you can go through, the database and and start following people that you wanna have a little bit more, information on. Now, once you do that, you might wanna see a list of all the people that you are following. And if you go under my settings and following, you'll see a complete list of people you're following. Now, the my settings is found under the login status up in this upper, right hand corner. You also, while you're there under my settings, want to set your following settings. So it's not enough that you're just following, these folks. You do need to configure what do you want to know about these folks. And so out of the box, these are a few of your options. So you can be alerted when, they've been recently baptized, when they began serving, when there's, their birthdays coming up. And notice this one, it says required. Your system administrator or you as administrator can make certain certain one of these following events actually required. So in this case, birthdays is required. So we'll get a update of when it's their birthday. When they joined a small group, upcoming anniversaries, or upcoming birthdays. Now the difference between these upcoming versus this other birthday is the birthday here is it'll announce and notify you on their exact birthday. These upcomings allow you to be warned ahead of times, a few days ahead of time. So in case you wanted to get a card in the mail or you want to do something a little bit more special, you have time to plan. So, again, not enough that you just follow folks, need to come in here and set your events. Now, mentioned that you can, , set up these events as an administrator and this is where you do that under admin tools, system settings, following events. And you'll see here the different options. So go ahead and as an administrator, set these up. A lot of these are, based on certain person attributes or certain characteristics about the birthday, but you also have, this one which is very, customizable called person, first join group type. So as you set up your group types, be thinking about what kind of notifications you might wanna get for following events and it's really easy to set up these, types. And so out of the box, your your options are a person anniversary, a person baptized, person birthday, person first attended group of type, or person first joined group of type. And so, some of these can be done more than once on the birthday, you could set one up to say, hey, that day or you could set it up again to, hey, give me a few days notice before the birthday, so that I can, , get a card in the mail. Okay. So we saw how we could follow people manually, but that sometimes is kind of tedious to go around the database and start following them manually. So there's also this feature called following suggestions. And what this will do is it'll send you an email, for people who, the system thinks that perhaps you should be following but you're not currently. And so basically this works by recommending people who are in a group, together. So family members for instance would be a group type of family and so we would recommend that you follow family members. And some of these can be automatically followed too. So in this case with family members you might automatically follow that. Another good one is is fellow staff members. So there are some type group type for staff. And so if you're in the group together here, there's also some roles and security roles you could use for this too. So you could auto follow staff or you could suggest that they follow staff. Same thing with fellow group members and serving team members. Now when we look at known relationships, there's a whole video on what that what the known relationships are, but remember that's just really a group. So it's very easy to follow those who you have a known relationship for. So when you set up these following suggestions, really the only suggestion type is in group together. We hope to add more in the future but for right now this actually does a lot because you can use this one type in lots of different ways. Okay. And so this is just showing you that we the only option right now is in group together and then you limit that by a group type. Now, if you want to get those, suggestions working correctly, you do have to enable this job. So this is the send following suggestion job. So it is configured out of the box, but it's not active. So you have to come in here and just check active and, pretty much everything else can stay the same. There's already an email template for this, so you can go change it if you'd but for the most part it's it's pretty much what you would want. The only other setting you might want to look at is who do you want to, be eligible for following. So a lot of times it it doesn't make sense for everybody in the database to have this following feature. You wouldn't want members and attendees, , starting to follow each other. So in this case, out of the box, we configure it for just the staff workers, which is probably what you want, but you can actually choose a different, role down here if you'd . So setting up the suggestions is is not enough. You actually have to come configure this job, which honestly is probably just as as hard as just checking this active and then everything else is probably configured the way you'd want it. So that's the following features at a high level within Rock.