Other Relationships

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Other Relationships

Product Type /

Web/Mobile

Role /

UX Design

Year /

2022

Context

ACS Technologies is a ministry development company that helps churches identify their optimum ministry focus, educate their teams for maximum effectiveness, and provide them with the right tools to make it all work together.

The products could be ready to use, or they can be fully customized to meet specific needs.

Realm is a Ready to Use product. The most popular church management solution in ACST. 100% online and mobile, Realm can be personalized to fit all kinds of faith traditions, roles, and ministry areas.

This project is to enhance Realm to include Other Relationships with profiles. This functionality would be available as a part of the core Realm solution and usable by any ministry partner with Realm ICMO.

Adding Other Relationships to Realm Inform, Connect, Multiply, and Office adds value by:

Strengthening our core ChMS by creating necessary feature parity.
Further closing the gap between ACST legacy products and Realm.
Enable a smoother transition and more complete conversion from legacy products.
Enhance ministry partners’ ability to know and grow deeper relationships with their members.

Problem

What's the problem we are trying to solve?

“It’s all about relationships”

Churches are relational.
Effective ministry strengthens relationships.
Building the kingdom requires building relationships.
Other relationships are individuals within the church or organization who are related to each other but who are not part of each other's family records.

However,

Realm does not provide a method for handling other relationships. (Relationships between individuals that are not part of the same family record).
Converting other relationships into Realm notes offers limited benefit to ministry partners and is not acceptable.
Profile features to track “relationships” or “other relationships” are available in ACS/PDS legacy and Ministry Platform. Users who were transferred from the legacy products love this “Other relationships” feature.

So,

Realm does a great job of managing split family relationships that share child custody. Adding other relationships to Realm profiles fills a feature gap and makes profiles more complete.

More than 39 Realm ministry partners reporting,
111 User Voice votes,
116 Get Satisfaction Me Too’s are associated with this feature request since 2013, and they are logged in Jira Tickets and User Voice, which also include specific quotes.

Definition of "Other Relationships"

Extend family relationships examples included: (most common)

aunts, uncles, grandparents,
a brother or sister who has his or her own family record
a parent of an adult child that has his or her own family record.

Other relevant relationships

Godparent, foster parent
Mentor, sponsor
family friends

User Groups

Who benefits from a solution to this problem?

Ministers and staff

Tracking other relationships would create value for ministers and staff that care for the needs of the congregation.

New ministers and staff

Access to other relationships is especially helpful as new ministers and staff become familiar with the congregation they serve.

Connect app users

Having access to other relationships in the Realm Connect app allows members to see other relationships tied to a family. This would help prevent members from adding adult children to their families when they are already in Realm as their own household.

Shepherd app users

Having access to other relationships in the Realm Shepard app supports the efforts of users that seek to know and shepherd.

Nonprofit ministries

Understanding the non-family connections between donors can be helpful in donor development. Nonprofits that develop key donor relationships often rely on referrals from current donors.

Scenarios

Some of the ways other relationships impact ministry include...

When there is a death of someone in your church, it is so helpful to know of anyone related to that person.
Also, if an elderly person falls down coming out of the service, you will need to know if there is a family member in your database that you can contact.
In times of crisis “other relationships” may be the people that show up to encourage, pray, provide a meal, or lean a helping hand. Knowing who is in the extended family can facilitate service opportunities.
Many small churches have been "the" church in that town for generations. So other relationships give Realm the ability to track multi-generational households allowing the ministry leaders to better serve them in times of crisis, grief, and celebration.

Data Analysis

Frequency of other relationships in OnDemand...

51% of ACS OnDemand clients use other relationships to track relationships outside of the core family unit.

64% of mid-sized churches are using other relationships. The majority of ACS OnDemand churches are mid-sized 2,193 (47%).

Competitive Analysis

When compared to other competitive ChMS, Realm lacks the ability to identify how extended families are related. Competitive ChMS tracks other relationships and is referenced in help files.

Servant Keeper, Is adding mentor, sponsor, and partner to their relatives tab.

Aplos, has a Relationships section.

FellowshipOne, has a relationship management feature that is used to define relationship types and roles.

PCO, We do not see Other Relationships but cannot definitively say if it’s available

CCB Identifies people that are connected to the family but not in the nuclear family.

Measures of Success

To understand the success of other relations, ACST would need to track the following:

How many sites set up “other relationships”
Customer satisfaction. Survey? MPS?

Design Criteria

Wireframe

Concept 1: Permissions

Concept 2: Relationship Tags

Concept 3: Profile

Concept 4: Possible Duplicates, Merge

Concept 5: Profile Report > Printing, Predefined Reports, Printed

Validation Testing

Target Group

Both admin and non-admin users who manage people profiles with any Realm package.

Test Goal

Understand how relationships data is used and how it can be helpful from an administrative perspective.
Understand whether the design concept for managing relationships is usable.
Understand whether we need more granular permission bits.

Approach Participants

There were a total of eight participants across eight sessions. Participants were recruited from the UX research participant database. The target audience was church staff responsible for managing people profiles with any Realm package. A range of denominations, typical weekly attendances, and geographic locations were represented (see table below).

Findings

General Findings

Validation:

Participants are currently tracking relationships, other than immediate family, between people at their church.
Understanding different relationships would help participants in scenarios such as ministering to congregants. profiles, and multi-generational households.

Validation & Opportunity:

While participants are not currently tracking relationships between a person and business, they expressed interest in having the ability to do so.

Note:

Participants found little to no value in reporting on relationship information.

Relationship Tags

Validation:

Participants found the default relationship tags sufficient with the ability to add custom tags.
Participants found giving manage permissions to non-administrators for relationship tags clear and intuitive.
Participants found adding a relationship to a profile clear and intuitive.
The options on the add relationship modal were clear and understandable to participants.
Participants expressed a need to track split families at their church.

Opportunity:

The option to add your own relationship tag was not findable for participants. Consider adding the option in the relationships list within the add relationship modal.