Idaho Initiative

Is there a single location to get a list of all names in a ward who would qualify to report for the Idaho Initiative?

What's the Idaho Initiative?

What is the "Idaho initiative"?

Please be aware that church rolls are only for church use, and cannot be used for political use.

A quick search shows that the term "Idaho Initiative" has been used by some missions to refer to certain missionary efforts focused on part member families. If that's what you are referring to, then the best answer I know of is in a custom report, such as the one describe on the wiki at Part-member families.

The Idaho initiative is a church program for member reactivation. It targets a number of groups. The lists should include kids 9-18 that are not baptized, part member families, families without priesthood in the home, list of inactive families.(there are 5 lists and that is 4, forgetting 1) The ward council is supposed work on those lists to get families back to activity by concentrating on them. You can get the 9-18 list cleanly out of custom reports. Part member families I have never found a combination of stuff that gets them all in one report under custom. You can filter most of them off but some of them will slip through the cracks if you don't do it manually. The goal is to track all interactions with members of these lists via the new and returning member progress forms so this can be a long term steady effort. At the same time each auxiliary is supposed to pick say 5 members from the list to work on steady for the short term. If they are getting results stay with it and if not in say 3 to 6 months replace with new names to try. It is a huge record keeping pain. If you are in a large ward with people needing callings I will say maybe worth it. In a smaller ward where most people have at least 2 callings it is overload. If you are dealing with a normal ward council on overload odds are the people won't put in the work to make it fly. But most of the reports can be generated through custom reports in MLS. If someone has a version that gets all part member families without missing any I would love to have a copy. I never managed to write one that dealt with all the variables to generate that list. The one from my stake clerk came close but his still missed some so we ended up just printing a full ward list and then marking it with highlighters to show which families hit which of the lists.

Our set up for it was a 3 inch 3 ring binder with an in progress section for the new and returning member progress forms. We were trying to take notes on the back of each form to have a long term record of effort. Behind that the various lists from above. Finally behind that was a fully tabbed by letter section of new and returning member progress forms. When someone new was added their name was pulled up and into the in progress section up front. After a few months of no action their form was returned to the alphabetical storage at the back of the notebook.

I am sure it works in places but I have to say in my ward it failed although we are still nibbling at it trying to make it work. We mostly have fallen back to simply working on a reduced Perry plan and have dropped idaho initiative. You have to walk before you can run and while I know our stake leaders want it implemented it didn't work here. If someone has a better version always willing to learn.

jirp wrote:Part member families I have never found a combination of stuff that gets them all in one report under custom. You can filter most of them off but some of them will slip through the cracks if you don't do it manually.

The custom report I linked to certainly includes all part member families where a member has a nonmember spouse. That's the vast majority of part member families, in my experience. What other cases are you talking about?

If you want cases where both parents are members but have nonmember children, that's not really reportable since such children have no records and so there are no criteria that would include them. If you want cases where children are members but have nonmember parents, you have the same problem.

aebrown wrote:If you want cases where both parents are members but have nonmember children, that's not really reportable since such children have no records and so there are no criteria that would include them. If you want cases where children are members but have nonmember parents, you have the same problem.

You might be able to do something with children of record who have passed the age of baptism. That's about the only situation where you'll have records to be able to make any such report.

The part-member family report does pre-suppose that all marriages are recorded. That's the only way the computer can tell the difference between a single adult and someone who's married to a nonmember.

sbradshaw wrote:The part-member family report does pre-suppose that all marriages are recorded.

Which requires a certain minimum amount of information. If the member isn't active, that can be difficult to get.

I think what we're getting at is that any computer report is just the starting point. One still needs to go though the ward list to find all the odd cases that the computer didn't know about.