Home Teachers and LDS.ORG Personal Profile

Good Evening,
Is there any hope of having a family's / Individual home teachers name(s) and Phone Number(s) show up on an individuals LDS.ORG Directory Profile? My Elders Quorum / Bishop wanted to find out how to distribute the most up to date Home Teaching Assignments without publicizing the whole thing and/or spending two weeks delivering by hand (in a ward of 620 + people) then doing it again when something changes the next month.

Any input on how this is done?

Thanks

jonejam2 wrote:Is there any hope of having a family's / Individual home teachers name(s) and Phone Number(s) show up on an individuals LDS.ORG Directory Profile?

Eventually. But such projects run on their own time-line, seemingly independent of any requests by the end users.

I think it would be a more productive use of one's time to think about how such things could be done, within policy, with the tools that are available. Perhaps sending something by email.

Mail merge to email. It requires Microsoft's Excel, Word and Outlook/Outlook Express. You can connect Outlook to a gmail account using POP/IMAP. This allows you to send a personlized email to each address.

Although you have 620+ people, I'd bet the actual number of households is much less, making this a more manageable task than originally thought.

Right, emailing 254 families would be simple - IF - we could get them all to add an email address to their records.

I could also print out a custom report in MLS, but MLS doesn't give you an option in custom reports to pull "assigned as home Teacher with Individual OR Household phone number" it only gives us "assigned as home teacher with contact phone number" which really gives us the "Individual's" contact number.

Unfortunately, 65% of the members in my ward have a "household" phone number and no individual number listed and 20% have no contact information at all. Email is way down in the 25% available realm.

I could go through and give each male Home Teacher an individual contact # based on their household #, but that too is a lot of work. I think the best thing to do would be to allow the LDS.ORG directory to pull up an individual's home teacher's name and contact information when they look at their own profiles under the directory.

jonejam2 wrote:I think the best thing to do would be to allow the LDS.ORG directory to pull up an individual's home teacher's name and contact information when they look at their own profiles under the directory.

The development team will accept all recommendations. Use the Submit Feedback link at the bottom of the directory page. However, we are not normally informed of recommendations that will be incorporated in any future upgrades. With that in mind it could be a long way off before that capability exits. So in the mean time an alternative should be considered.

jonejam2 wrote: I think the best thing to do would be to allow the LDS.ORG directory to pull up an individual's home teacher's name and contact information when they look at their own profiles under the directory.

Part of the problem is that home teaching data (companionships, families assigned, visits) isn't even at CHQ yet. It is only stored locally in MLS. I have heard discussions around it, but I would guess it is a ways out still.

Thank you for the feedback. Sometimes I feel like one of those NASA guys that sits around dreaming things up.

I won't pretend to understand the complexities of the LDS.ORG project. I'm literally a networking / physical connectivity guy, so databases elude me. Having the ability to submit feedback with the hopes that it may come to fruition someday is enough.

I know that there are literally hundreds of Elder's Quorum secretary's and Relief Society VT coordinators out there each spending countless hours/days every couple of months printing and distributing this information. Any thought of relief, to them, is glorious.

Thank you