Promotion Prep¶
Once your system Admin has completed the Promotion Setup, the staff responsible for the classes/organizations involved in Promotion must do some preliminary prep work to the classes that will be part of Promotion.
Note
These same procedures can be applied whether you are using the Annual Promotion method (which uses the Promotion Setup) or if you are using Manage Organization Members for Promotion.
Empty the 12th Grade Orgs¶
Empty the classes for the oldest students involved in Promotion. These would normally be the 12th grade classes, as that is the highest grade into which you will promote students.
There are a couple of ways to accomplish this:
Drop all 12th graders from their existing classes. Have the College Ministry contact them regarding getting enrolled in a College class. OR
Move them into appropriate College classes yourself.
Important
Whichever method you choose, the 12th grade classes must be emptied of students before promotion can be finalized.
Note
Most churches invite the 12th graders to begin attending College classes as soon as the graduate from high school, even if their church promotion is not until August. If your 12th graders will continue meeting in their regular classes up until promotion, you will not do this step until the week just before Promotion. Or, you can include College in promotion and promote 12th graders into that class or those classes just like with other age groups.
Video Demonstration¶
This is a short video showing the easiest way to tag org members in order to add them to another org. It also demonstrates how to drop all of those tagged members from their various classes.
Clean Up Membership in Orgs¶
Do this by dropping members who have not attended all year, or those whose attendance is low enough to indicate that perhaps they should no longer be considered members of the organization. This step will help you with the next step.
See also
Why Drop Members?
This step keeps you from promoting someone who obviously never attends. Once they are no longer enrolled in a class, you can then pursue them as a prospect.
You may find class members that, after Promotion the previous year, joined a class at a different hour and were never dropped from their original class.
Promotion is also a good time to look for those children who have moved. You might want to look for anyone that has not attended in the past 6 months. Then look at the address or at the parents’ records to see if the parents have moved their church membership.
Here is a very short video demonstrating how to find and drop those org members with 0% attendance or those who have not attended in the past 6 months or so.
Video Demonstration¶
Current Orgs¶
Determine if you need to create any new classes, or change room #s (for the Pending Location).
Go to Organizations > Search / Manage and filter to find the appropriate Program and Division.
Then go to the Toolbar > Cloud > Export Excel > Export Organizations.
This will give you an Excel spreadsheet listing all the classes in your search. It will be a guide to help you see how many classes you have currently, how many are enrolled in each class, the location and much more.
See also
Export Involvements to Excel for all the fields included in the export
More Orgs Needed¶
If you need more classes at a specific hour than you have currently, here is what to do.
Go to Organizations > Search / Manage and filter for organizations in the same Program and Division and with the same Schedule but with a Status of Inactive
If you find one, change the Status from Inactive to Active and make any other necessary changes.
Once the org is active, even if there are no students currently enrolled in it, that org will display in the list of available Pending orgs on the Promotion Management Page. If you are using Manage Org Members for Promotion, the org will appear as a Target class.
If there is not an appropriate Inactive class, create a new class.
See also
Warning
If you have more classes than you will need for Promotion, wait until after Promotion has been finalized then make the classes Inactive.
Example: You currently have three 6th grade classes, but are promoting only enough 5th graders to require two classes. Keep all three classes active so you can promote the students currently in those classes. Decide which class you will not use and make sure you do not move any students into it. After you finalize Promotion (or after you move the students if you are using Manage org Members for Promotion) you can then make the class inactive.
See also
Annual Promotion for your next step.
Why Re-Use Inactive Orgs?
Our recommendation is always to re-use an existing org instead of creating new ones for the same purpose. This just keeps your data more organized. Even if you rename an org from 1st Grade Class A to First Grade A, an individual’s history will display the name of the class at the time they were dropped.