HT/VT Reporting Website Overview

[russellhltn]

Does anyone know if the Home/Visiting Teaching assignments list is uploaded to Salt Lake via the MLS system? Or are only the results sent?

I think the answer is .... both.

I think only the stats are passed along to the stake and CHQ.

But, CHQ also makes a backup of each unit about every 30 days.

[brado426]

I think the answer is .... both..

If this were the case, it would be great. This system, of course, needs to have the latest "HT/VT Assignments List"

1. Presidency makes necessary changes to HT/VT assignments within MLS at the ward

2. Presidency triggers upload of HT/VT assignments to Salt Lake

3. The process in Salt Lake that imports the uploaded data sends a copy of the HT/VT assignments list to the HT/VT Reporting Web system.

4. Once all reporting is complete on the HT/VT Reporting Web system, Presidency can click on a button to transmit results data to the main church database (the database where results are fed from MLS today.)

This eliminates any importing/exporting of files from the MLS system. It also eliminates any data entry of HV/VT results from the website to MLS.

Of course, none of this could be done without making changes to the church back-end systems, but I think these changes would not be too major. I don't think it would require any changes to the MLS system installed on ward PCs.

Brad O.

[russellhltn]

I agree it should be do-able, but it's something it seems the church will have to do on it's own.

At this point all I can suggest is that you make the program usable for your stake on your servers and once you've got a fully functional system, then you can share the code with the church so they can speed the development along. With that in mind, you may want to emulate the look and feel of the official website - not close enough to create confusion in anyone's mind, but emulate the style at the program style level to make it easer for the developers to adapt it.

[brado426]

I agree it should be do-able, but it's something it seems the church will have to do on it's own.

Absolutely.... I'm just contemplating what would be possible if it was integrated with the church's systems.

At this point all I can suggest is that you make the program usable for your stake on your servers and once you've got a fully functional system...

We do have a fully functional system. I have at least two tasks that I know would need to be completed before the church could use the system. However, both tasks require guidance and specifications from the church.

Brad O.

[brado426]

Thanks for the suggestions, folks. One of the people currently testing the site just recommended a change that I really think is worthwhile.

We've changed wording of "Visited" to "Visited With Family" and added a new option entitled, "Attempted." The "Attempted" status is really the same thing as "Not Visited" but it is necessary to clarify to the teachers that there is a difference between visiting with the family and attempting to visit with the family.

So now we have:

For Home Teaching:

"Visited With Family" - Counted
"Appointment Made" - Not Counted
"Not Visited" - Not Counted
"Attempted" - Not Counted
(Not Reported) - Not Counted


For Visiting Teaching:

"Not Contacted" - Not Counted
"Visited With Sister" - Counted
"Phone" - Counted
"Letter" - Counted
"Attempted" - Not Counted
(Not Reported) - Not Counted

[scion-p40]

I like the addition of "attempted visit". At one time, I was assigned to visit an inactive member who did not answer the phone when I called, did not return voicemail, did not respond to mail, and did not answer the door when I dropped by her home. In addition to reporting to my supervisor, I contacted the RS president after several months of failed attempts. She reviewed her records and found that this person had allowed VT contacts in the past, but they were all old timers in the ward who knew her from years ago. The additional information led to a switch in VT assignments to someone with whom this sister felt comfortable. Attempted provides more feedback to the leadership than no visit.

[Mr. M-p40]

I made the suggestion to include other types of visits and mark them as counted. I would still encourage the addtion even if they aren't counted with a report breaking them out. I think we got hung up on what's official to count or not and missed my point.

It is just as important to me as the EQP to know a family was called or sent a letter as anything else is. To say that a family was visited or not for numbers is fine. But HT isn't really about numbers. I can counsel my hometeachers to do their "visits" monthly as prescribed in the handbook and turn in numbers for that. Nothing would stop a home teacher from selecting "VISITED WITH FAMILY" for what they considered a visit (even if it was a phone call). However, if they had other options to select like phone call, I would know what REALLY happened with the family and EQP or HPGL not the home teacher could decide what counted.

[Mr. M-p40]

One more thought would be to make a log for the family, instead of a single entry type selection...What if you visited a family multiple times in a month...for numbers you would only need one entry but for a resource tool you would want to know all entries.

True Scenarios...
A family lost a dad has multiple children...the VT provide dinners and child care for two weeks...HT visit daily or every other day to check in do chores etc. EQP wants to track that because it could explain why another family of that HT only got a phone call. (By the handbook neither would count as visited technically because no lesson was taught...but I would still want to know what happened with them.)
This would display as multiple entries for a single family, instead of one log as visited.

A family is preparing to go to the temple to be sealed and the HT was asked to go with a lesson twice a month. I would want to track that also to report back to the Bishop on the assignment. (This would count as visited and would show two entries a month.)

[brado426]

My concern isn't whether the Phone/Letter contacts are counted or not. My concern is that when the Home Teacher reports, will they see the Phone/Letter contact options and think, "I'm not going to go through the extra trouble of visiting this month because I can just do a phone or letter contact?" For Visiting Teaching, the church encourages Visits, but also encourages Phone/Letter contacts. For Home Teaching, Phone/Letter contacts are not mentioned as far as I know.

I see your point, Mr. M. and I agree that it would be good information for the Presidency. I guess I'm just not comfortable enough that the church would approve of gathering phone/letter contacts for Home Teaching. Ultimately, I think the church needs to make this decision. We talked about possibly color-coding to make it clear of what was expected of the Home Teacher, but I'm still not certain of how this should be handled.... at least not certain enough to begin making any additional changes.

I think the "Attempted" option is excellent and does not stray from church guidance. Mr. M., sorry I forgot you had also mentioned that option earlier. I guess it took two people to bring it up for me to get me to realize how great of an idea it was.

Brad O.

[brado426]

Two things:

First:

If the Church has IIS/.NET applications in-house, what database is being used for them? MS SQL? MySQL? I was thinking about switching this application's database to whatever the church used.

Second:

Below are some suggestions that were recently sent to me that one of the HT/VT testers has come up with and my replies to them.

I think I will add #2 as I have thought about doing that for some time. #3 doesn’t make much sense to me. I guess I need to ask him why he cares about a per-district percentage. #1 is too complicated for now and I think this is an exception that most people would not want.

One thing that has surprised me in working on this project is that each ward tends to handle their Home/Visiting teaching a little bit differently, which is why I had to add all these System Settings checkboxesto to allow the Presidency to enable and disable certain behaviors and features.



It doesn’t look as though it is possible to come up with one solution that works for everyone. The “System Settings” checkbox list continues to grow as these variances become apparent.J

E-Mail from tester below. My reply comments are bolded:

Brad,
We have been testing the system for 2 months.We have a couple of questions and
suggestions:

1. The notes that a home teacher sends in, can each note be combined and
forwarded on to someone like the Bishopric?

If you’re using an e-mail program like Microsoft Outlook, you can highlight all the comment e-mails and click forward to send them to the Bishop. The application does not currently have a way to combine and forward to the Bishop automatically.

If you’d like the HT Report to go to the Bishop automatically, you could always set his access level to Supervisor. For your Elders quorum where the Bishop is not on the list, you can simply add the Bishop to a lone companionship in MLS, upload to the website, and set the Bishop’s access level to Supervisor.

2. Is there a way to send group emails? Also, is there a way to send an
email only to those who have not reported their home teaching results?

These are both options I have thought about implementing but haven’t gotten around to yet. We’ll see.J

3. At the end of each district on the monthly report is it possible to have
the number of families in each district and the % of families that were HTed
in that district?

This is certainly possible. I’ll add this to my list.

4. Does the link have to expire each month? Some people copy the link and
paste it in their browser, but it seems to expire monthly and so they have
to keep going to the most recent's month email.

The links are designed to expire for security reasons. They expire on the 15th of the next month. For example, May’s links will expire on June 15th. This gives the teachers plenty of time to report after the end of the month. Remember that the links are coded for a particular month... you cannot use May’s link to report for June, so you always want to access your reporting page with the link that was most recently e-mailed to you.