Young brings together everything around youth activities: camps, retreats, day trips and evening gatherings. It answers a simple gap: until now, an activity filled up, took its money and ended without leaving the slightest trace for the following year.
The words
Four words are enough to understand the whole module.
- The camp: a dated activity, with a venue, seats and registrations. It is the basic unit, whether it lasts four days or one evening.
- The edition: the year of the camp. You never type it, it follows from the start date, and it is how you find "last summer's camp" without searching.
- The young person: a permanent file, independent from any camp. This is what keeps the history: camps attended, presence, payments.
- The venue: a holiday centre, a lodge, a hall. Created once, reused year after year.
Opening the module
Young appears in the left menu, under Worship & Ministry. Access needs the Young - View permission; creating a camp, taking money or checking people in needs Young - Manage.
Member or not
A young person from your church can be linked to their member record. That link changes three things.
- Their member photo shows everywhere in Young, and follows any change made on their record.
- Their file links back to their member record in one click.
- Year after year, you know which of your members take part and which ones drift away.
Someone from outside has no member record, and that is fine: they still get their file, their history and their ticket. They are often the ones who become members later.
One file per young person, year after year
When someone registers from the public page, Young first looks for an existing file. The match is made on three concurring facts only: the e-mail address, the date of birth and the first name.
Three facts rather than one, for a very concrete reason: in a family, children often share the parent's e-mail address, and twins share their date of birth. A single criterion would mix up brothers and sisters.
When the file is found, the registration joins its history, and missing details are filled in without ever overwriting what you had entered. The public page says nothing about that history: it confirms the registration, no more.
Duplicates
Despite that net, two files can end up describing the same person: a first name spelled differently, an address changed between two summers. The Young home page then shows a banner listing them.
Each pair opens side by side, and you decide.
- Merge: registrations, payments and history move onto the file you keep; empty fields are filled in, filled fields never move.
- Ignore: these really are two different people.
The merge refuses to run if both files hold a live seat on the same camp: that would be lost money or a ghost seat. Cancel one of the two registrations first.
Finding someone
From the Young home page, pick the edition at the top, then the Young people tab. The list is searchable by name, and each row opens the full file: identity, guardian if they are a minor, and their history camp by camp.