Helps for Elders Quorum Presidents and Presidencies

Are there any online lists/reports for Elders Quorum Presidents or presidencies?

Having recently served in callings where I could access lds.org/leader I'm finding that I now feel hindered in my ability to administer to the Elders Quorum. We currently have requests from the ward and stake to clean up our lists, but the lists they send me are excel spreadsheets and out of date.

I want to compare these lists against an updated list of the members of the Elders Quorum, but I don't have access to lds.org/leader anymore and it seems that I can't find an update list anywhere online. lds.org/directory is helpful, but in our ward we hid everyone that told us they didn't want to be contacted. (And thus now I can no longer tell if someone is simply hidden or if their records have been moved out).

I know I can go over to the church and log in to MLS, but then that list is only accurate at the time of printing... I LOVED LOVED LOVED the online lists... it saved me lots of time by not having to drive over to the church.

Is there something like this for Elders Quorum? Perhaps, at least, for Elders Quorum Presidents?

Thank you~!

No, not yet.

MLS is still your best friend. While some lists would truly be nice from LDS.org, it's not available yet to you. However, many more of the "helps" you can use to help you administer the quorum aren't there for anyone!

I guess I'm suggesting the some of the "helpful" reports that I used in your position, and asked my secretary to compile, are not the standard reports available on LDS.org anyway. Some were custom reports, others were kept on spreadsheets and written in notebooks. Examples:

• Monthly reports: Home teaching statistics of visits made to:
  • families with no MP in home,
  • elders married but not sealed (or endowed)
  • prospective elders, etc.
  • New move-ins, new members
• Elders Not attending any meeting for past one month and past three months (yeah, we kept role EVERY month so we knew who came- quarterly wasn't detailed enough)
• Elders not assigned to be Home Taught
• Families not visited, sorted by date last taught and currently assigned home teachers (can be surprising!) This works well as a "prioritizer" list for HT PPI's, as we all know the guy who is front and center in the HT PPI line every month should be congratulated, but he may not always be the guy we need to talk to the most....

I was surprised at how much we knew about our quorum when we started "looking deeper" into our statistics then just what the quarterlies required. Names will begin to pop-up on these lists, and can be watched in each presidency meeting, or discussed in ward council, etc., and you'll begin to clean up those records like the stake and ward has requested of you.

While I, too, hope that LDS.org gets more useful to organization leaders, my fear is that in the process, the local MLS goes away, and the reports become "cookie-cutter" and we will loose MLS's "custom report" and database manipulation ability.

Thank you for the suggestions! We are currently keeping role every week, so the more granular attendance info is available. We'll have to poke around with MLS and see what reporting is built-in and what we'll have to custom make via the Custom Reports (unless of course someone has already done the leg work with the custom reports; I didn't see any EQ specific ones on http://tech.lds.org/wiki/Custom_reports
Thanks again!

[Moderator Note: fixed link, kisaac 5/3/2012]

Now you've got me started...

Like any computer program, the pres. and the secretary need some MLS "play" time to get familiar, so just figure it won't be on a Sunday, and probably not on bishopric meeting night. It's also where the "magnifying your calling" of a secretary can kick in.

The Organization/HT statistics/HT Reporting section has some of the built-in reports, like "Families not assigned to be home taught," and "unassigned potential home teacher,"and "families not visited." The easiest customization is here; Begin to set the parameters of these as you can, then start sorting by the columns by clicking on them.

For example, set the "consecutive months not visited" to 13, and click the "Visits" column label to sort by the column, toggle by clicking again if needed, then look at the family in your quorum (or ward, depending on your parameters) who hasn't been visited for the longest time. And realize you just did more than some (many? most?) EQ secretaries or presidents or ward clerks ever do! Vow to go visit them yourself, or change their home teacher, or move the records to the ward they moved to 7 months ago, or whatever you are inspired to do. For more advanced sorting, copy to the clipboard, and paste into a spreadsheet.
[added 5/6/12: Actually, I hope most wards have no members that have not been home taught for 13 consecutive months! So set your consecutive months lower until you find your workable list. Try 6 months, 3 months, etc]

But, to go more in depth, build a simple custom report and substitute criteria. The tricky part is realizing what is a Criteria and what is a Format field, and to realize each new set of criteria will be it's own custom report. To get you started, modify one in the wiki: try Criteria of:
[INDENT] Organization Class -- is -- Elder
(Note that you are NOT choosing Priesthood -- is -- Elder for this so you pick up everyone assigned by your MLS to the Elders quorum regardless of the priesthood they hold, but if this doesn't work, remove it and see note below)
Marriage Status -- is -- Married
Member Status -- is not -- Spouse is Member
[/INDENT]and Format (the report columns part) of:[INDENT] Preferred Name
Spouse Name
HT Statistics (12 months)
Home Teachers
[/INDENT]The report gives you the visit record for one year of a family assigned to the elders quorum who is a "part member family," and lists their currently assigned home teachers. (Who may not have been assigned to them for that whole period, however.)

To make it instead list the report of those with no MP in the home:
[INDENT] Organization Class -- is -- Elder
Household Position -- is -- Head of House
Priesthood-- is not -- Melchizedek
[/INDENT]Change the criteria to be anything else, such as "Move-in date," Confirmation date," Marriage status is married, and member status is not sealed to spouse," Priesthood is ____________" etc, etc, etc.

Note for Custom reports: Some criteria, that are valid, and should return data does not, and the above examples I have not actually tried on a live MLS to make sure they work..... Just keep simplifying your report until it works and then build it back again...
Good luck

kisaac wrote:While I, too, hope that LDS.org gets more useful to organization leaders, my fear is that in the process, the local MLS goes away, and the reports become "cookie-cutter" and we will loose MLS's "custom report" and database manipulation ability.

My hope is that MLS Web will (eventually) have the same ability to create custom reports. It would be inconceivable for the church to return to keeping paper and pencil records now that we have MLS. We will get to the point where it will be difficult for us to conceive returning to the Desktop MLS after MLS Web has had time to mature. At least, I hope that will be true!

kisaac wrote:my fear is that in the process, the local MLS goes away, and the reports become "cookie-cutter" and we will loose MLS's "custom report" and database manipulation ability.

nbflint wrote:My hope is that MLS Web will (eventually) have the same ability to create custom reports. ..... We will get to the point where it will be difficult for us to conceive returning to the Desktop MLS after MLS Web has had time to mature. At least, I hope that will be true!

Not meaning to fork the thread, but just offer an explanation of comments earlier in this thread....

The big point I see currently, is that CHQ does not keep any local "specific" data unrelated to a membership record, calling, or recommend, and does not keep data on HT/VT assignments or statistics, or custom class assignments, or custom member fields. This information we enter locally on the MLS desktop. This data is specific to your ward's MLS only, currently, and does not transfer to your stake or the church with a send and receive (other than the quarterly report data you enter.)

Until they change that, some functionality of our desktop MLS remains on our desktop MLS and the online MLS can only process what the church holds in the actual membership record or callings database (that we can see in CDOL.) That is why a roll printed on LDS.org clerk resources can be different than the roll for the same class printed on your clerk's MLS desktop machine. And that is why I fear we will lose functionality if we lose the desktop MLS, unless the church allocates more resources to house more "local" data, and makes the process that accommodates submission of more locally entered data. We've been waiting for a HT/VT online app, but it's been slow in coming, and would require that big jump in resources at CHQ to collect and save it online. We areseeing the "direction" of more data housed at CHQ as a priority, for the calendar, new newsletter features, etc...

Anyway, these are just my observations and suspicions, as I have no actual knowledge of the future road-map or MLS or the inner workings of the processes currently. Others here may know....

It would be helpful to know when this app will receive attention again. There has been a bunch of marketing about using leader.lds.org, and for a view-only resource it is fantastic, I use it quite frequently. I still see leaders in wards backed up in a queue waiting for access to the MLS computer on Sunday. I find it odd that this hasn't been addressed the auxiliaries.