The Dashboard provides a quick look at upcoming life events for the members of your church, upcoming touchpoints or tasks, church events, and holidays. The dashboard also provides a section that will provide vitals on your congregation, such as breakdowns of your Membership across different groups, member activity, attendance and giving.
To access the Dashboard, click on the "Common Reports" button along the top bar of Shepherd's Staff (The button with an R and a globe on it) and then choose "Dashboard". From here, there are two tabs to the Dashboard:
Note: If you want the dashboard to appear each time you start Shepherd's Staff, check the "Show on startup" checkbox at the bottom left corner of the window for the Dashboard.
Upcoming:
This tab provides information about upcoming events for both the members of your church, as well as any planned touchpoints, tasks, church events or holidays.
- Select how far out you want to look at upcoming events in the "in the next" field. In the droplist, you can choose between 7 to 90 days out from today's date. This will affect which events you see in the grid to the right.
- Select what kind of events you want to see in the menu on the left side of the screen. Clicking on that type of event will display the upcoming events of that type. If you are not sure on how Shepherd's Staff is determined which people show up in your selection, click the ? button at the top of the list.
- At the bottom of the grid, you will see different options, depending on the type of events you have selected.
- "Member" events
- Edit - This will open the person record of the person you have selected in the grid so you can make changes
- Address - This will copy the selected person's mailing address to the Windows clipboard
- Email - This will open the email window with that person's email address already filled in within the "To:" field
- Plan - This will let you create a Planned Touchpoint for the person you have selected.
- Subgroup - This will create a static subgroup of all the people within the the grid
- Export - This export the information in the grid to the spreadsheet program you use on your computer.
- Print - This will provide you with a variety of printing options including contact lists and mailing labels
- Tasks
- Complete - This will mark the selected task as being completed, moving it to your list of completed tasks.
- Export - This export the information in the grid to the spreadsheet program you use on your computer.
- Church Events
- Edit - This will open the event record of the event you have selected in the grid so you can make changes.
- Export - This export the information in the grid to the spreadsheet program you use on your computer.
- Print - This will print you a list of events, sorted by date, and within the date, by time.
- "Member" events
Vitals
This tab provides figures for your current membership, membership activity, attendance and giving.
Note: Clicking anywhere you see a magnifying glass button on this screen will take you to where Shepherd's Staff is pulling this information from if you want to see more detailed information about the selected item. Clicking anywhere you see a ? button on this screen will provide you with more information about how Shepherd's Staff is calculating figures in that section.
- After opening the Dashboard, click on the "Vitals" tab to get to the Vitals section of the Dashboard.
- The Vitals section is broken up into 4 different areas: Current Members, Member Activity, Attendance and Giving.
- Current Members - Broken up into a "Counts" and "Behavior across" section, this section provides demographic information as well as information numbers and percentages of your current members who attended, communed and gave. To the right of the "Behavior Across" header, you can change what time period this section is looking over.
- Member Activity - This section provides numbers for all people in your database about life events, membership changes, attendance in Worship, Communion and Sunday School and giving.
- Attendance - This section provides figures for attendance such as the number of attendance events, the number of attendees, average number of attendees, distinct people, visitors and distinct visitors across the time period indicated in the "For" field.
- Giving - This section provides counts of the number of envelopes and givers you have, as well as total giving and year-to-date giving across your 3 most recent years.
- Clicking the Circular Arrow button in the bottom right corner in any of these areas will refresh your data, if you had this window open while making changes within Shepherd's Staff, and clicking the button that looks like a clipboard with an arrow will copy the data in that section to the Windows clipboard.