Churches
Church leadership team
this is a hypothetical use case -- therefore this text is evolving and will only get better with feedback, clarifying questions, ideas for improvement, and any other input you can offer.
The "Church of Peace" has approximately 150 individuals who they consider to be part of their congregation of about 80 households. This includes regularly attending members; members of the neighborhood that come less frequently; and some elderly members who no longer attend in person. A leadership team consists of two pastors, an administrator, and three elders.
The church has suspended any in-person gatherings in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It's been 4 weeks since they started meeting online and less than 30 households have generally been participating.
The leadership team is able to continue communicating to its members through an email list, live-streamed services, and a facebook group that approximately half of the members participate in. The pastors have begun calling or otherwise communicating with specific members as part of their ongoing outreach and to make sure specific individuals (who they perceive to have fewer connections) to see how they're doing.
Most of the regular members are known to be in regular contact with each other and few are considered to be in very at-risk situations. Less is known about neighborhood attendees and new faces. New concerns about exposure to seniors will motivate connecting with elderly members with greater frequency than the pastors will be able to do within their current capacity.
The leadership team decides to work together to ensure that each household has been directly communicated with by at least one other congregation member (including the leadership team) on a weekly basis. They learn about how we are using sumApp and decide to put it to use. They fill out the survey and make the following decisions:
Because they don't want the map to be seen as some sort of popularity contest (knowing that some members have far fewer acquaintances than others), they decide to initially evaluate connection status only among their team rather than enlist the entire congregation in mapping current connections.
Since they are committed to checking in weekly, they choose to primarily focus on the quality of the connection rather than the frequency, using the following options:
I have received at least one message/email response from this person/household in the past week.
I have spoken or zoomed directly with this person/household at least once in the past week.
I'm in contact with this person several times a week apart from this project, and can be counted on to keep in touch with them by default.
Since they are doing most of the monitoring themselves, they decide not to use a survey. They also decide to use a spreadsheet to track whatever needs and offers or other info emerges rather than sumApp.
They start by verifying they have a full and accurate list of names of everyone they consider to be a part of the congregation. The list also includes family associations as obvious default connections.
Then they load the list into the sumApp dashboard in order to begin evaluating connection status.
They launch the project and make sure that each member of the team has their own link to work with. Each member then goes through the list and indicates their connection status, if any. Filtering the list to focus on adults expedites the process. They also set up a "church service" account, which the administrator connects to everyone who participated in the online service.
Then they review the map (ignoring unanswered outreach) to see how well people have been connected with over the past week.
please do not save changes
Current Map
Based on the map, it's clear that some members are more connected than others, and quite a few did not happen to be engaged by any of the team members over the past week. They decide to distribute the the households without any connections among team members based on familiarity, and to reach out to them in the coming week. They agree to each update their sumApp connections in one week, and they designate one leader to review the results and report back to the group on who might benefit most from additional outreach.