Kids of divorced parents

As an ex-ward membership clerk and a divorced dad, I noticed that due to how the church handles records, my kids and other divorced parents children were many times left out of activity notifications and activities since they were not on the ward list. This is something the Church needs to address. My kids are with me every other Sunday and parts of every other week. With the technology we have there should be a way to share their records with a pirmary/secondary setting for them. They can have one ward as their primary or designated ward, but the other parents ward can be a secondary ward so leaders can coordinate and make sure the kids of divorce are not left out. How can we achieve this? Could we not just make adjustments to the overall membership DB to allow for a secondary ward that would allow those kids to be seen by the alternate ward? I work in IT and a close friend of mine works for the Church in IT so I am fully aware of the size of the Church DB, but table adjustments and additions happen as needs change so how can we highlight this with the leaders of the church so it can be addressed?

Chadsmall wrote:How can we achieve this? Could we not just make adjustments to the overall membership DB to allow for a secondary ward that would allow those kids to be seen by the alternate ward?

LDSTech is primarily other users in a user-to-user support mode. While we do have some church employees who chime in now and then (and we're really grateful when the do!) they are "implementers" and not deciders of that kind of thing. So, while there is a need, advocating for it in LDSTech isn't going to get far.

Your two best choices:
- Use the "Feedback" link on the main lds.org website.
- Talk to your stake president about discussing the problem with the area authority.

In your case, a third avenue is to ask your friend about what he thinks is the best way to push for this.

The church is "priesthood-centered" not "customer-centered" as we're accustomed to. Everything has to be sponsored by either the Priesthood or a department in the church. The developers don't get the decide on what features are created.

Chadsmall wrote:As an ex-ward membership clerk and a divorced dad, I noticed that due to how the church handles records, my kids and other divorced parents children were many times left out of activity notifications and activities since they were not on the ward list. ... [H]ow can we highlight this with the leaders of the church so it can be addressed?

We are aware of these kinds of issues. The teams that work on these tools have a fair amount of ecclesiastical leadership experience (five current and several former clerks, along with quite a bit of other leadership experience), so we've run into them before in our own wards and stakes.

Besides the technical issues involved, there are also priesthood councils that determine how these issues are handled from a policy and procedural standpoint. They develop the policies on how things should work and then we turn that into functioning applications, in that order.

russellhltn's suggestion for handling this is the correct approach.