This is the grand finale in our fireworks display of blog posts dedicated to outlining MemberHub’s family-oriented features.

Over the last two weeks we’ve talked about Setting Up Your Family and the new built-in help sections thoughout the application. We’ve also discussed how to add family members and the advantages to correctly setting up your family in MemberHub.

Just like the old testament points to the gospel in the new testament, those previous posts point to a new feature in MemberHub that really make use of all this family stuff. Simply stated, you can now group the members in your hubs into families. Said another way, you can create a hub and encourage members to join themselves and other family members into the hub and then, on the Members page in that hub, you can view information about the family. There is a family picture and members can drill down into each person of that family to read each respective profile. So what’s that good for? Here are just a few examples:

• Online church directory
• Preschool programs
• Elementary school classes
• Cub scouts, girl scouts
• Any family-oriented group that needs a private place to collaborate

Perhaps the best use of this new feature would be the online church directory. In my 8 years at our current church we’ve done one printed directory. This directory contains the single worst picture ever taken of me (my wife looks beautiful as always) and it’s so outdated it’s not funny…well maybe it is funny. You get my point here. These days it really is possible and it makes sense to have your directory online where your members can update their pictures, bio, and correspondence information in a timely fashion.

At the risk of creating a super long post, I’m not going to put the details of how to configure this new feature in MemberHub into this post. You’ll just have to wait till the next post. The anticipation will be tough ;-).

Almost everything in your life can be digital now. It’s quite amazing actually. As a family we rarely print pictures any more. Even the ones that we want to share get loaded onto a digital picture frame and proudly displayed in the middle of our house. I figure we’re saving a lot of trees; considering how many pictures we take of our 2 year old.

As true as this is for most folks, there are still a bunch of organizations that haven’t gone “digital”. One of them that is trying is the pre-school that my daughter is in. These teachers and coordinators pour their lives into these children. They teach them to pray before meals, teach them manners, how to act socially around other children, and there are endless games and crafts that help develop our children physically and spiritually. But they definitely go through lots of paper.

Sure craft-time causes them to use construction paper like it’s going out of style, but it’s much more than that. The entire parent directory, which changes drastically every year is printed and bound. There aren’t many days that go by that an announcement is sent home on  pink or green sheet of paper. There is one teacher that even burns cd’s for each parent with pictures of the kids. The photos are named by each kid and sorted appropriately. I’m thinking pre-school programs could be quite the market for MemberHub.

Here are 5 ways that pre-schools and teachers can save money and trees by using online group communication tools:

1. Allow parents to share and maintain their profile information online
2. Send announcements via email and text messaging
3. Upload all files, forms and parent tips into a common area; online
4. Share photos online
5. Encourage parents to share ideas, ask questions and generally connect online

Certainly this is just the beginning of the list. Can you think of any more? If you’re a pre-school or elementary teacher or a parent of young children in these programs I’d love for you to leave a comment and share more ideas below.