Mobile Ministry Magazine

One of the things that I've noticed in a good deal of the chruches that I've visited is that there is very little in terms of tracking that is done in the child-care areas. Either there is a rotating set of people looking at a paper clipboard, or there is nothing at all except parents bringing kids in and out without anything more than facial recognition to know who goes and does what. Many places would do well to have an electornic sign-in component that is a part of the registration process for child-care. Besides providing accountability to the organization, there is also a chance to use that data to better make use of volunteers and other support workers.

Of course, using a sign-in based component to navigating child-care in ministry settings is not the only way, but can be a very effective one -- especially in larger churches with multiple age groups. Expanding this idea to using the handheld component to also facilitate this growing population group in churches can make a more interactive process out of this, and facilitate the already existing human connections that we make when child-care ministry is used.

What This Could Look Like
The idea would be a set of shared handhelds (for the sake of demonstration I'll just use the Palm Tungsten E2) which are synced to a central server by the child-care admin. A database application would be created for use on the handhelds that mirrors the already existing paper forms. However, the database would be the just the adminstrator's means of checking what child was where, who dropped off/picked up, and when. The administrators would carry these single purpose handhelds with them at all times, making sure to check with child-care workers as to who is where. In larger groups this could be expanded to a person(s) assigned over a particular age group but who also floats room to room during the child-care time.

Other Possiblities
A system like this could also be adapted to taking pictures of the children and saving them into that same database so that there is some sort of recognition accountablity that is able to be kept.

Advancing this further would be specific check-in handhelds where parents would sign their children in on the handheld, and then signature capture, along with photo capture, would be used to idenitfy what children are where and when they were there.

Just An Idea, But Could It Also Be A Need?
This is just an idea to show other areas where mobile tech can be integrated into ministry settings, Church Tech Matters had done a whole series on check-in software -- which is where this thought comes from -- and its really good to know what is available out there that hasn't been thought of or used just yet.

Seeing that budgets to do more elaborate systems are not there, I've proposed something that would take less in terms of setting up, but would be scalable to something more robust -- unless something like this already exists. How would your church or organization respond to a system like this? And is such a system even necessary in such intimate settings?

Labels: children, community, mobile