Logistical tracking needs outside of LCR

[mkmurray]

I would imagine many bishoprics resort to the same things that I find our current bishopric utilizing for tracking logistical details regarding the membership in mediums outside of LCR. I'm speaking of use cases like tracking which members have given a sacrament meeting talk and when, or perhaps keeping a trail of ministering council efforts and visits, etc. As you can imagine, when members are tracked outside of LCR there is obvious risk of information getting out of sync with LCR as members move in or out of the ward, or other data updates happen that are best tracked in LCR but affect these outside data sources.

My question is if there is any advice for these type of use cases for better tracking and syncing this data? Are there ways in LCR to create custom data fields to track purely logistical things like this at the local level? If so, I imagine custom reports could then be used in much the same way that Google Sheets are used today. If it's common to use Google Sheets for these needs, has anyone ever set up a system of sharing high-level member details across a few different sheets and workbooks so that the problem of data syncing is isolated to just one source of truth?

Or is that just the job of a clerk to enable these capabilities for the bishopric, even if necessary to dedicate my time and energy to manually keeping a few different data sources in sync and accurate?

[russellhltn]

Thanks to data privacy laws, most, if not all of the methods of data export have been removed. Putting membership information into electronic format outside of church-provided systems is a touchy subject.

You might want to read section 4.8 of the well-hidden Technology Standards document.

[eblood66]

No custom fields or other way of adding any additional data in LCR.

For things like talks, bishoprics I've worked with have just kept a list of who's given a talk in the last several years (usually by date) without any attempt to purge it of anyone who's moved out. Councilors consider the ward list for potential speakers and consult the talk history if they couldn't remember when someone last spoke.

For council efforts when I was ward clerk, I'd take minutes during meetings and bring forward any pertinent information from previous minutes if it's still relevant. That kept the current efforts visible. I'd keep my history of the minutes where I could search them if the council had questions about older efforts. Some might use a shared spreadsheet or document but if so, I'd be careful about putting sensitive information there. Even for my minutes I was careful about what information I included because I also emailed them to the council after each meeting.

I'd be careful about making things too complicated (creating spreadsheets/databases with entire ward membership listed and such). The effort to keep it up to date for immediate quick reference may not be worth it for how many times it's really needed. I'd only do something like that if it's really being used in an effective way and often.

[mkmurray]

Thank you for the thoughtful points and cautions. I agree, any sensitive information outside of LCR should be avoided as much as possible. Probably not a big deal to have some ward member names next to some dates for the purposes of sacrament talks tracking. But I agree that any member lists that need to be up-to-date should come from LCR if at all possible. I also don't see value in setting up some elaborate system for data like this, probably best to keep it manual, locked down, and intentional about any time data is outside of LCR.