Signed Electronically Church Membership Made Easy

Signed electronically church membership

welcome to today's webinar my name is rachel klein and i will be your presenter here for the next 20 minutes um today we are going to be um discussing cast certification and ncoa processing um so these are options that you have available to you within the membership module in church windows so just a couple bit of housekeeping things here before we get started in the topic um you can ask questions during the presentation but it is just me in here today so please keep in mind that if you do have a question i'm not going to get to it until the end of the presentation i find that if i try to read the question while i am teaching you the material i get myself mixed up so if you do have a question just type it in but just just know that i'm not going to get to it until the end of the webinar when we do a little bit of a q a but you can simply type that question into that question section on your go to webinar toolbar just expand that tab and you can type that right in also i am recording this webinar um that was brought to my attention that we have never done a webinar on this topic before um it's not a super commonly used um topic but it's something that i definitely want to touch on for those customers who utilize it so i will get this cleaned up and have it put up on the website on our support center page uh by the end of the day so you are able to go back re-watch it or share it with someone that you you feel might find this beneficial okay so couple things just to clarify the cash certification that stands for coding accuracy support system and then we're also going to talk about the ncoa processing which is the national change of address processing so if you are going to do bulk mailing this is important um important things that you need to use to then be able to use different software to uh to match or fit for post um for bark mailing services okay so one thing i do want to touch on before we jump into how to do the output and the input in church windows membership itself is that certification needs to be done by a firm certified by the us post office okay so one thing to keep in mind though is that you can use postal one service which is actually through the us post office if you decide to to go with the postal one surface then you don't need to use this cast certification and the ncoa processing functions in church windows okay now if you opt to use postage saver with your church windows or any other type of bulk mailing program that the us post office offers then you can use this function to then create your your exports get your your data cache certified and then import it back into church windows okay but if you're going to go through postal one through your post office you do not need to do this okay i just want to clarify so you have some options um one of the companies that we have partnered with to do this cash certification is lorton data so what i'm going to show you um is on our website real quick where you can gather some more information on wharton data specifically so if you go under investigating you go to cw partners it's going to take you to our partner page if you scroll down here a little bit lorten data you click on this it's going to give you some more information about morton and it's also going to have the form that you need to use to then contact and apply for data to get your data cast certified okay now um again there is always or we are always going to recommend that you talk to your local pulse post office for bulk mailing requirements in your area okay so we have found that depending on where you live even depending on your city what post office you go to some of their bulk mailing requirements are going to be a little bit different okay so before you what i would recommend before you go out and pay for the expense of morton data i would first talk to your postmaster talk to your post office make sure you have all the information you need before you decide to invest and do this purchase through gorton data also check out postal one again that's free the post office offers that um you can always look into that as well to see which fits your needs better okay i hope i was clear on that again if you want more information head out here to our website um also you can research postage saver if that's something of interest to you and you can do that at www dot bulk mail dot info and you can get some good information there as well okay so let's start uh the process here for the cass um and the ncoa processing within church windows we'll go ahead and go into membership here and this process is actually pretty simple in membership up at the top you're going to click on special functions and then right here you have your cast and your ncoa option go ahead and click on that first thing you're going to do is create the file okay so the process for how this works whoops is you are going to take out all of your your addresses that you have in church windows you're going to export that out into a file then that file is going to go over to lorton data or if there's some other company that you choose that the post office approves of to certify your data they are then going to look at all these addresses make sure that they are accurate they are correct addresses and then they're also going to look at that ncoa that national change of address processing to make sure if somebody's moved it's going to have their new address available for you okay so once they get all that data certified for you they are then going to send you a file back that you will then input back into church windows okay i just wanted to review the process real quick so you guys know what i'm going over so first step here is creating that file to send to lorton data okay so as you can see up here at the top you can decide if you just want members or you want them visitors included as well you also have the option to include donations individual givers or donations group giver so those are givers who have only been put in over on the donations side of church windows okay everybody in here is going to automatically be checked to be exported if you have a couple that you want to remove you can simply uncheck that box and they won't be part of the export if you wish okay and then bottom right you're just going to hit the export button here it's going to give you a default file location if you want to change that location you want to put it somewhere else so you throw it out on your desktop which is what i'm going to do whoops wrong button here the little dot dot button there choose your desktop and then you can save it make sure the location is what you want and then simply hit ok all right and then you're going to get the message the file has been created it's going to give you that location the file is always going to be called u s p s convo c o n v dot text okay or it could be a csv for comma separated value they're both text files ones tab one's comma delimited both will work don't change the name of this file though okay so don't export it and save it as a different name keep it as the usps conv as the file name itself right it's going to ask if i want to open the folder i can say yes just to see where it's saved which you can see it's right up here at the top now with that being said you don't need to open this file again you do not change the file name this is the file that simply gets sent off to lorton data to do the conversion so whether you put it on a flash drive send it in whether you upload it to their website instructions will be available at wharton data for how you get them the data itself okay now keep in mind when lorton has your data and they are cleaning up and certifying those addresses any changes you may get to someone's address within your data in church windows when you import that data back in is going to be overwritten so i would recommend not updating anybody's addresses until you get your data back from lord okay because anything you change is going to be wiped out when you put the import put the file back in okay so now let's talk about importing the data back in once morton certifies it and sends it back to you okay first thing we are always going to recommend is making a backup of your data anytime you do a mass data change within your software we are always always going to recommend making a backup of your data so you have your data at that point before you make the change if something were to occur something were to be wiped out not saying it happens all the time but we have seen it safeguard make a backup okay so once you make your backup of your data you're going to come back up here special functions hit this cast ncoa option and you're going to go to import this time all right and then whether you get the data back on a flash drive plug that in whether you download it from an email what have you save that file locally somewhere on your machine so you can browse to it and import it so you'll hit select file simply just going to pick the one that we just did even though it's not certified but for example sake i'm just going to go with this and we're going to open it and then it's going to take that now certified cleaned up data that's ready for bulk mailing and it's going to bring it back in to your church windows here okay and then you're going to hit the import button and it's going to tell you all addresses has been all addresses successfully imported excuse me and then you're going to say okay and that's all there is to it all right so it's actually very simple process pulling the data exporting the data out of church windows sending it to lorton them certifying it getting it back to you and then you importing it back in okay now keep in mind too if you want information on this today's webinar i went through one of our workbooks it was the membership 203 workbook pages 28 through 30. all of this is in here so if you were if you are the type of person that likes it in black and white feel free to buy that workbook and then you can have all of this information at your disposal okay but i wanna i want to make sure i'm clear with you as well that you do have a free service offered through the us post office okay so this is this is a newer service i'll say it's a couple years it's been around um but check on this too um go out to www.usps.com postal one okay