Feature Requests: Email VT/HT Changes, Add Comments Box for VT/HT Companionships

I'm the Relief Society secretary and am responsible for reporting and updating VT changes in "Leader and Clerk Resources." I would LOVE the ability to send a email from LDS.org directly to companionships containing all their visiting teaching assignment and supervisor information. If this capability already exists and you know how to find it, please post a reply!

The other feature I would be very glad to have is a comment/notes box for visiting teaching and home teaching companionships. Often, we need to assign VT/HT for an individual or family for whom we do not yet have official Church records. Other times, we need to include short instructions, such as how the companionships should contact a specific sister. The notes box would give leaders and clerks an opportunity to add special instructions to a VT/HT assignment.

I really doubt if either will happen. My personal reading of the situation is that our leaders will nix anything that encourages the concept of "here's your tasks, tell me when you hit your checkboxes". There needs to be some quality interaction in both the assignment and the reporting.

Free-form fields are unlikely as well. It becomes a liability for the church when it's "recorded" in a computer system. That's the kind of thing that should be communicated as part of the assignment.

I understand what you are saying about legal liabilities but there really needs to be a way to track members who have requested no contact. Sometimes visiting someone who has requested no contact can cause more harm than good. The legal liabilities issue can go the other way too when people decide to use other systems to track this type of information. This doesn't even need to be a text field of any kind. it could simply be a flag of some kind.

dmarsha11 wrote:I understand what you are saying about legal liabilities but there really needs to be a way to track members who have requested no contact.

Your original post did not mention members requesting not to be contacted. That has been a discussion topic long before the LDSTech Forum was ever created. The official response from headquarters was, and still is, that, and I paraphrase, membership records should not include any do not contact or "dnc" annotations. There are a number of forum threads discussing the methods used to track members requesting not to be contacted. The one I have found that works best is to place all the households for home teaching and all sisters for visiting teaching under one unique district with the bishop as the district supervisor for home teaching and the Relief Society President as the district supervisor for visiting teaching.

dmarsha11 wrote:This doesn't even need to be a text field of any kind. it could simply be a flag of some kind.

This is specifically what the church direction prohibits.

Back to the first part of her question, is there a way to be able to send VT assignments via email? It would be immensely helpful. It is one way to make sure the assignment gets to the right person and they don't lose it, not to mention the time saving part of it.

You can print the assignment to a .pdf document and attach to an e-mail. That is the only way currently to e-mail assignments. As mentioned previously, HT and VT are not "check-the-box" activities and the personal dialog is desired, even if it is inconvenient sometimes. What happens with members who don't have/use e-mail or smart phones? I can't count how many times people have tried to text my land line and wondered why I never responded...

I understand where personal dialog is important and I reserve those for a more personal delivery. I also am aware of who is or is not using email or smart phones and they get a personal delivery. Sometimes the change is as simple as removing one person. But this last month especially, because of needing to wait to get the previous month's report done before I could make any changes combined with having stake conference, my VT coordinator and I dropped the 30 plus changes at the homes. Many of the sisters were not home so the assignments were taped to the door. I felt good about getting everything delivered. Then, just yesterday, found out that at least one sister did not get her assignment. I have no idea who else did not get their assignment. I have also experienced someone whose calling it was to deliver assignments, reporting to me that they were delivered, but in fact they were not. Being able to easily email an assignment would be very helpful and I trust that each RS pres is aware of those who need a more personal delivery and looks forward to the opportunity to do it that way.