Website inbox

The Website inbox collects what visitors send through the website, sorted by kind, so nothing waits in a shared mailbox for someone to notice it.

When to use this

• First thing on Monday, to follow up on the weekend's visit plans and connection cards.
• Before Sunday, to see who's planning to come and who's bringing children.
• When the prayer team meets.

Read what's come in

1. Open Website › Inbox. Each kind of submission has its own card with a count.
2. Select a card to open its list:
   • Visit plans: who's coming, when, and how they'd like to hear from the church.
   • Connection cards: what each person is interested in, with a suggested owner (a team, not a person) chosen from what they ticked.
   • Prayer requests: see below.
   • Event registrations and the class roster, such as the membership class.
   • Kids pre-registration: families who've said they're bringing children. They also show as pending on Kids check-in.
   • Giving and pledges: campaign pledges made on the site. Gifts themselves go to Stripe, not here.

Prayer requests are restricted

Prayer requests are among the most private things the church holds. They're kept apart from everything else:

• Most staff can see only how many requests are waiting, never what they say.
• The prayer team can read requests meant for the prayer team; requests marked Pastors only are visible to pastoral staff only.
• Notifications say only that a request is waiting, with a link. The request text is never in an email or a text.

In the sandbox, the Viewing as buttons let you see each of those views. In the live system, the view follows your role, needs two-step sign-in, and every read is logged.

Follow up

Each submission tells you who to contact and how they'd like to be contacted. Use the suggested owner as a starting point: the connections team for a connection card, the welcome team for a visit plan. Add new people to People when they're ready, rather than leaving them only in the inbox.

Good to know

• Owners are roles with shared mailboxes (for example, "Welcome team"), never one person's address, so nothing is lost when someone is away.
• Medical and allergy answers from forms are restricted; they're never shown in the inbox.

Top tips

• Reply to a visit plan before the weekend: a friendly note on Thursday makes Sunday much less daunting for a guest.
• Treat the inbox as a to-do list, not an archive: once someone is in People with a follow-up note, the job is done.