Learning Center

Being able to find and interact with your church or ministry’s staff is very important for your website users. When visitors are looking for a new church home, they want to know who you are. We still find that many churches either bury their staff directory or they don’t have one at all. Important information that should be available in staff directories are names, correct title, picture and a brief bio. People want to know who to look for when they get to your church! This includes your church’s support staff, administrators and custodial staff who often are not members of the church, but are the face of the church during the week when people might stop by.

The Worship Times Staff Management system helps simplify this essential tool. This video provides a general overview of the staff plug-in and highlights some under-the-hood changes we’ve made. This includes a brand new built-in Email Log and a better experience for mobile users.

Here at Worship Times, we’ve made a couple of changes to the back-end of how things work and the functionality of the staff form specifically. In this article, we’ll tell you about some of the changes that we’ve made, and we’ll give you a refresher on a basic overview of how to use the Staff plug-in.

1. From your dashboard, go to Staff in your left admin bar.
2. If you already have staff, you’ll see a full list of all of your staff listings.
3. Add New Staff
   1. Click on Add New Staff.
   2. Enter in their full name.
   3. Type in a sort order number – this determines the order in which your staff appears in the staff listing.
   4. Add their job title.
   5. Add their email – this will auto-create a form on their staff page and that form will be directly tied to that staff member’s email address. If somebody submits that form, it will go directly to them.
   6. Add their phone number.
   7. Add a full bio.
   8. Add a bio preview – just be a couple of sentences. The bio preview is what shows up on the staff listing page (whereas, the full bio will show up on the individual staff page).
   9. Add a staff image. The ratio is 125 by 145 pixels. We recommend doubling that for retina screens, so 250 by 290 pixels.
   10. On the right-hand side, select a department or multiple departments. You can also create a new department here. Selecting a department is what tells the website to display this staff member in the appropriate list on the front-end of your website.
   11. Publish.
4. Edit Staff
   1. From the full staff list, you can edit a staff member that’s already been created by hovering over the staff member and clicking on Edit..
5. View Staff
   1. You can also view that staff listing on the front-end by clicking on View, and that will take you directly to the individual staff page. On the front-end, there’s a photo, the biography, the phone number, and then the contact form that gets submitted directly to that person’s email address.
6. Add a Staff Listing
   1. Create a new page or edit a current page.
   2. Go into the editor and click on Add Media.
   3. Scroll to the bottom, and click on Staff List.
   4. If you have multiple departments, you can select that specific department.
   5. Select how many staff you’d like to display on one page.
   6. Click on Insert Staff List. This will insert a short code into that page, and that short code is what tells the webpage to pull from the database of your staff.
   7. Click on Publish.

On the front-end, when viewing a staff listing or individual staff, you may have noticed some changes. We’ve made some styling changes to the way the Staff plug-in looks. However, this does vary theme to theme, and some of you already have some custom styling on your staff forms. So if you see anything out of the ordinary or something looks weird to you, feel free to submit a support ticket or contact us at support@worshiptimes.org and let us know.

The big change we’ve made is the form on the individual staff pages and how that works. It used to be that this form was directly tied to our forms system called Gravity Forms. That is no longer the case. This is its own thing now, completely separate from Gravity Forms, so you will not find the form or the entries in Gravity Forms anymore. If you go to your forms on your back-end, and you see a form called Contact Staff, it’s not necessary anymore. You don’t have to delete it, but just know that we are no longer using the Contact Staff form in the most recent version of the Staff plug-in.

Under Staff, click on Entries Log, and you will see all the entries for all of your staff. You’ll see the staff name, first and last name of the person who submitted the request, their email address, and the phone number that they submitted if they filled out a phone number. Click on the link to see the message that was sent via the submission form. If you need to resend that email notification, for any reason, you click on that link, and the submission will get resent to the staff person.

You may see a warning now at the top of pages on the back-end of your website that says, “Emails from this website may not be delivered due to new restrictions by email providers, an email address that matches your domain needs to be set up and authenticated for sending emails from this website.”

We have had issues in the past several months where emails are running into issues being sent directly from the website, for instance in form notifications and when you set up a new user and it sends an email – those emails just aren’t getting through. They’re not even going to spam. In some cases they are, so that is always the first place that you want to check. But in some cases they’re just not getting sent at all, and this is because of email providers completely blocking emails that haven’t been authenticated in some way.

One of the first ways the email providers can shut down emails even coming in is by comparing the email address that the email is coming from with the domain of the website that the email is being sent from. And if those two things don’t match, some email providers are saying, nope, don’t send it at all.

What we strongly recommend is that if you don’t already have email addresses with the same name as your domain name (your website URL), you need to get that as soon as possible. We recommend a Google Workspace for Nonprofits. It’s free once you approve your nonprofit status. And again, if you need any help along the way in getting that set up, just send us a support ticket and we’ll send you the links, what you need to do, and how you need to do it.

After you get set up on Google Workspace, they’ll give you some TXT records, which you’ll give to us, and we’ll add those into your DNS. Once your new emails are set up, you’ll change your website admin email to an email that matches your website domain, then your emails will start going through. As part of that process, we also can authenticate that new email address through SendGrid and that just further helps tell email providers that this email is safe; it is coming from a legitimate website; and we want this email to go through.