Introduction

The Pastoral Care plugin allows you to record contact items as well as customize different Care Types such as hospital visits and in-home visits

Overview

Several new components that work together to track pastoral care are bundled into the Pastoral Care Plugin. Let’s examine these components.

Care Types—Care Types represent the types of contacts you want to record. Whether you want to track hospital visits, deacon contacts, in-home visits, or even general contacts, you can create a custom type for each along with custom fields for that type.

Care Items – These are the actual contact items for people. They’ll contain fields custom to the care type.

SETUP

To configure the plugin, we’ll need to configure some Care Types

Setting Up Care Types

Log in to your Rock account, and then navigate to People > Manage > Pastoral Care.
It won’t contain any Care Types out of the box. Click the gear in the upper right-hand corner to add some.

You’ll be presented with the Care Types page. Click the plus button in the upper right-hand corner to add a Care Type.

By default, Care Items will contain a field for the person, the contactor, the contact date, and an optional short description. If you want any custom fields, add them under ‘Care Item Attributes’ while creating a Care Type. If you want them to be filterable and show on grids, be sure to check ‘Show on Grid’.

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Hit Save once you’re done.
Go back to the Care Types page and click the Shared Care Item Attributes link. This will take you to a page where you can specify attributes you want all care items to have.
Go back to the Care Types page and click the Shared Care Contact Attributes link. This will take you to a page where you can specify attributes you want all care contacts to have.

Plugin Features

Pastoral Care Dashboard

Under People > Manage > Pastoral Care, we now have a list of Care Types and the items associated with them:

Care Item Detail

Clicking one of the Care Items on the dashboard will pull up the item detail. From here, you can modify the item or navigate to the associated person’s profile. A single care item can have many different types, such as if someone requires both hospital visits and deacon contact. Having everything in one place helps church staff prevent accidentally double-contacting a person and enables them to see everything they need at a glance.

Person Profile Page – Pastoral Care Tab

Under the Person Profile > Pastoral Care tab, you can also view a list of care items that have been made for that person:

Workflow Actions

In addition to creating and managing pastoral care items through the provided blocks and pages, you can now use workflows to automate your business processes. In this release, we include the following workflow actions to help you create and manage care items:

Care Item Create: This will create the care item and set it as a workflow attribute.

Care Contact Create: This allows the user to add a contact to the care item.
Add Contact Item Attribute: This allows the user to add an attribute value to the contact item. If the attribute is for a particular care type, specify it using the Care Types field. If left blank, the action will try to find a shared attribute matching the provided key.