Set up check-in seamlessly at your church with this comprehensive guide from Breeze ChMS. Explore step-by-step instructions to configure and customize your check-in process efficiently. Whether for Sunday services, events, or classes, this article empowers you to streamline check-in procedures and enhance attendee experience. Discover now to optimize your church's check-in process with Breeze ChMS.
How to set up a fast, safe, and easy check-in system at your church.
Having an efficient, intuitive, and safe check-in process at your church is important.
It increases safety, allows for a deeper understanding of who is coming (and who is not), and builds trust with the families in your church.
Using Breeze for check in allows you the opportunity to have a secure pick up process, track attendance, and print name tags (which can include important information such as a child’s allergy, parent’s contact information, or a shared security code between child and parent).
Here's how you can set this up with Breeze...
Ensure Your People are Loaded into Breeze
The first thing you’ll need to do is make sure that you have all of your individuals, children and parents and families inside of Breeze with basic information on the profiles (such as names, emails, phone numbers, grade, birthdays, etc).
Have your people in Breeze? Great, you’re good to move on to the next step!
If you don't have all of your people loaded yet, there are three ways to add your people into Breeze:
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Move In
If you're just starting up, we'd love to help you move in your data from a previous system. You can find more details in our Moving Your Data Into Breeze, Getting Started article. -
Add Person Page
You can add each person to the system from the Add Person page. -
Check-In Page
You can add each person to the system from the check in page.
Create Tags
After you get everyone into the system, you’ll next move on to creating tags. While not required, putting people into tags and limiting an event to only displaying people within those tags can help both your check in process go more smoothly (by limiting the number of people displayed) as well as give more advanced reporting abilities (the ability to report by tag).
- Create a Tag Folder
For organizational purposes, we suggest creating a folder first, for all of these new Tags to go into, something like “Children's Ministry,” or "Small Groups", that is all-encompassing.
- Create Tags
Then, it’s time to create some tags! You’ll want to create a tag for each of the classrooms or child groups (e.g. Nursery, Pre-K, etc) or small groups. This process will enable us to later view attendance based on the classrooms or groups.
Here's an example of what this will look like:
- Add People to Tags
Next, you'll want to add people to their respective tags. An easy way to bulk add individuals to the tags is going to be from the People section, where you’re able to filter search based on the criteria for your tags.
For example, if you have the tags created for groups of children based off of age, you can do an advanced search for an age range (0-1, 2-4, etc). Or if you have the tags created for groups of children based off of their grade, you can do an advanced search for individuals who match particular grades (Pre-K, Kindergarten, etc).
After you've searched with the appropriate filters, you can then bulk add these individuals to a tag, using the Action Panel on the righthand side.
Create the Event
Now that your tags are set up, you'll move on to creating a recurring event to be used for check in.
On the events page, click to create a new event and set it as a recurring event.
The title of this event should be something all-encompassing, such as "Children's Ministry", as it will be used for the check in of all of your individual classrooms (Nursery, Pre-K, etc.). If you have multiple services, we recommend creating a different event for each services (e.g. 9:15am Children's Ministry, 11:00am Children's Ministry).
Setting the Event's Eligibility
Assuming you created tags to put people into in the previous step, during the creation of this new event you will want to change the check-in eligibility so it is limited to the tags you specify (this can also be done later within the event's settings). By doing this, only people within the specified tags will show up on the list.
Whether changing the eligibility upon creation, or later on in the event settings, you'll simply want to change it from "Everyone" to "Specific Tags." You will then choose the tags you would like to be eligible for the event (your child classroom tags).
Customizing Name Tags
Follow the directions found on Customizing Your Check In Name Tags to see how you can customize the name tags to fit your churches needs.
For added safety & security include the 3 or 4 digit code which will print on the child's name tag and the parents. Then the parent will bring their parent copy to check out their child.
Congratulations, your check-in is all set up!