One directory, kept current by the people in it.
The member directory is the center of Congregate. Nearly every other module reads from it, which means the effort you put into keeping it accurate pays off across attendance, messaging, job assignments, and everything else.
Names, addresses, numbers, email, birthdays, anniversaries, and more are built in, and you can add unlimited custom fields for whatever else your congregation records. Fields can be marked private so information visible to your leadership is not visible to the whole membership.
Photos work at both levels: an individual portrait for each member and a family photo for the household. Those same photos feed the digital photo wall and the printed directory, so one upload does several jobs.
Updated by members, verified by you.
The reason most church directories are wrong is that one person is responsible for updating everyone else’s information. Congregate flips that. Members can update their own contact details from their account or the mobile app, and changes appear in the directory immediately and in the weekly recap so the congregation knows something moved.
When you need to be certain, verification requests go out to members asking them to confirm or correct what you have on file, and you can see who has responded and who has not. That turns an annual directory cleanup from a project into a report.
Member groups divide the directory into whatever subgroups you use, and members can belong to as many as apply. Those groups then drive messaging, attendance filtering, etc. rather than being maintained separately in each place.
The whole directory downloads as a formatted PDF for printing, exports to a spreadsheet, and imports the same way, so getting started does not mean typing three hundred families by hand.
Highlights
- Unlimited custom fields, with private fields for leadership only
- Individual and family photos used across the directory, PDF, and digital photo wall
- Members update their own details from the web or the mobile app
- Updates appear automatically in the weekly recap
- Contact information verification with tracking of who has responded
- Unlimited member groups, with members in as many as apply
- Formatted PDF directory for printing
- Spreadsheet import and export
Who This Feature Helps
Members
One place to look up anyone in the congregation, and control over their own listing rather than asking someone else to update it.
Leaders
The directory stays accurate without one person carrying it, and the groups defined here do real work everywhere else in Congregate.