YSA Tracking Program

            I live in Bluffdale, Utah. Currently I am the Executive Secretary in the Bluffdale 12^th YSA ward. There are several YSA (Young Single Adults) within the stake that are not currently active in our ward. They may be attending their home ward, but many are not attending church at all. The Stake was required to call Shepherding Couples in each of the wards to minister to these individuals. There have been several difficulties in coordinating our ward’s efforts with those of the other wards in the stake. Another difficulty encountered is keeping everyone up to date on which individuals need to be ministered to. Individuals are constantly moving out or coming into the stake. Many times we find individuals who have left, but have not had their records sent to a new ward. If an individual is not attending our ward, we may send their record back to the family ward to be ministered to there. Keeping track of the changes and needs of each individual and communicating them back and forth is something that would be a full time calling in the Church. We do not have the luxury of having a person assigned to this; therefore, we needed to develop an efficient way of gathering and dispersing the information to all individual involved.

            In order to more rapidly determine which individuals were under who’s stewardship I developed a program which would use the information from a stake custom report and generate a report for each ward alerting them to changes in their ward. These changes include new members under their stewardship, members who are no longer under their stewardship, and changes to individuals who are currently under their stewardship. For individual changes, we look at a few important items, namely: phone numbers—cell and home, email address, living address, and assigned home teachers.

            Beyond just alerting each couple to the details of the individuals that they are ministering to, we wanted to provide a way that they could track their progress, ensure that an individual is progressing, and ultimately report and be held accountable for their ministering. In order to facilitate this we developed a system similar to the missionary forms used for tracking investigators. The form we developed is designed to be used on each individual. It provides a location to write details about each individual, activities and goals to accomplish, and a place to record the results of each visit. This allows for each couple to report individually on each person under their stewardship. It also allows them to easily pass the information on to another person should they be released and a new couple called. These forms could be filled out with each person’s information manually, but that would be time consuming. In order to make it easier for the couples, the program will fill out the forms for each individual in their ward. On a monthly basis it will send them new forms for the new individuals who have moved in. They simply need to keep a binder with the forms, or maintain the workbook on a computer, and add or remove individuals as they come and go.

            Although there is no automation in this portion, there is also a form designed to aid in the communication between the couple and the bishop, or between wards. It can be filled out after each visit to report actionable items that need to be completed by others. For example, if a couple visits and individual, and a visit from a member of our ward would help them, they could write the individual’s information and give some details of what we can accomplish in a visit. They can then pass that form to us. We will assign someone to visit the individual or complete the actionable item. Once complete we can use another form to report the results of our visit back to the couple, we may also include other visits or information we gain relevant to individuals in that ward.

If you ever have any questions feel free to contact me at wmorris(the symbol you get when you press shift and 2)byu.net 


Files:

The spreadsheet can be found here:
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/10f/wmorris/YSA_Tracking.xlsm 
The write up can be found here:
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/10f/wmorris/Final_Project_Writeup.pdf
Other files required are an export from MLS. As this contains personal information for several people I will not be uploading it. If you do need it, I can try and create some dummy data but this will not be public either.