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Promotion

Grade-Based Promotion

We recommend our automated daily Promotion routine be configured at your church for Participants who promote from one Group to another based on their grade. For example, when a 4th grader (currently in the 4th grade girls Group) completes the school year, she is moved to the 5th grade girls Group.

Set Up Automatic Grade-Based Promotion

To use the daily Promotion routine, open each applicable Group record and set the following values. Once this is complete and the routine is running on the server, individuals are moved daily and automatically:

  • Group Type: Any.
  • Promote to Group: Select the Group to which kids in this Group should be moved when they age-out of the Group.
  • Promotion Date: A future date for Group Participants to be moved by the routine to the Group indicated by the Promote to Group field. Allow at least 24 hours for the nightly routine to run. See Promotion Routine for more information.
  • Promote Weekly: When the Promotion Date option is used, Promote Weekly should be set to No.

For example:

  • Current Group Name: 4th Grade Girls
  • Promote to Group: 5th Grade Girls
  • Promotion Date: 8/15/2023
  • Promote Weekly: No

Exceptions and Troubleshooting

You can make exceptions for certain Participants one by one or by Group Role Type. You can also determine if the Group Participant records are updated or created. See Promotion Routine for details.

Manually Promote by Grade

We strongly recommend using the Promotion routine. However, if you must, you can manually promote by renaming the existing Age or Grade Groups, and create a new group only for kids entering the system.

  1. Start with the 12th grade, and rename it "Class of [Current Year]".
  2. Rename the 11th grade to "12th Grade".
  3. Review the Parent Group, Ministry, and Promote To values for each group to ensure they are correct for the newly renamed group.
  4. Repeat this for all other grades down to Kindergarten.
  5. On the Groups page, create a new Kindergarten group.
  6. Go to the Group Participants Page, and clear any existing selections.
  7. Select the current group participants in the 4-5 year old groups that need to move to Kindergarten.
    Tip: The "Age Group Part By Age" is a helpful view for this step.
  8. View "Currently Selected" records.
  9. From the Actions menu, select Assign.
  10. Set the group you created. Leave all other fields unchanged.
  11. Click OK to change the Group for the selected group participants.
  12. Clear your selection.

This is a great time to review the promotion setting for age-based groups (babies through 4 years old).

If any children need to be held back, you can edit their individual Group Participant record.

Alternative Approach for Group Promotion

Some churches have more complex promotion rules or have a "Sunday school" model with Groups based around a progression of classes that are not necessarily tied to age or grade. If you need to explicitly promote Participants from one Group to another, and using the Promotion routine or renaming Groups is not an option, you can use the alternative approach.

We recommend the Promotion routine as the best practice for managing promotion. However, if you have more complicated promotion rules that prevent you from using the automated routine, this topic guides you through an alternative promotion approach.

Which should I choose?

The way you promote simply depends on your children's ministry model as well as your preference for how data is logged and maintained over time. Both methods maintain attendance records for past and current Participants. The main difference is that one keeps the Participants intact, and the other moves them Group to Group.

In the automatic and manual approaches:
  • The group names change to reflect the grade, so there is no movement from group to group. The Group-Participant relationship stays the same from year to year.
  • You can easily look at the Participant's attendance across years.
  • You lose the ability to easily see a "snapshot" of a Group in the past.
  • You have fewer records. For example, the Group named "12th Grade" was called "11th Grade" a year ago, and "10th Grade" the year before that. So the Group really represents the "Class of" a certain year, and all the records tied to the Group can be thought of that way.
In the alternative approach:
  • You have two varieties - sharing the same group or creating new ones.
  • If you share groups, you keep the groups for each grade but move Participants between them. In this case, the 12th Grade group is the same group as it was last year, with different students in it. It would be easier to see what things the "Senior Class" has done over time than the "Class of 2023".
  • If you create new groups, Participants are added each year to a new Group, and the old Participants are end-dated. This means there is a snapshot of every grade, every year. The 12th Grade group from last year represents that particular class for that specific year. So, for example, you'll have a "12th Grade" for 2023 that is a snapshot and a "12th Grade" for 2022 that is a snapshot.
  • Both of these varieties take more work than the automatic and manual approaches, but the benefit is you can go back and see historical data, if that's important to you. A con is that you'll gather a lot of records over time.

If you decide on the alternative approach, you'll want to follow these steps the week of promotion, immediately before the first Sunday when Check-in will be used. If you are using the same Groups (that is, not end-dating Groups), and you want to work ahead, you can set up each class with new sets of future Group Participants with a future start date and update the current Group Participants with future end dates.

Tip: Use the same Date and time as the End Date when end dating Group Participants as part of Promotion. That way, you can quickly find all the records and can identify that the end dating was related to promotion (not moving, leaving or other circumstances).
  1. Clear all unsaved selections on the Group Participants and Participants pages.
  2. Open a current Group from the Groups page.
  3. Select the appropriate current Group Participants.
  4. Use the transfer tool. Select the "Participants" page (not Group Participants), and name the selection for the group it is promoting to. So, if you opened the 4th Grade Group, you'll want to name it "5th Grade Group".
  5. Repeat these steps for all Group Participants that need to be promoted.
  6. End date the current Group Participants using one of the following approaches:
    • Use the same Groups: Go to the Group Participants page. Search for and select the records of all the children, students or volunteers who need to be moved to another group. Use the mass assign button to give them an end date.
    • Use the same Groups: You can also end date any groups you are working with. This adds an end date to all of the Group Participants. You can then edit the Group record, remove the end date and move on.
    • Create new Groups: You may also want to end date all of the groups and create new ones.
  7. Go to the first Group you are ready to add the promoted kids/students to. Click Add, find your appropriate selection, and assign them to the Group with an appropriate start date (before your next check-in event).
  8. Clear your selection on the Participants Page.
  9. Repeat these steps for each Group.
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Last updated: July 16, 2024