Parish Emails and Parishioner Registration Data

 

For many years now, the school has enjoyed the efficiency and economy of email to parents of our enrolled children. How many remember the weighty "Wednesday Envelopes" which were dutifully carried home by the children each week? 

 

Parish Electronic Communications Hampered by Inability to Send

Database Email

Unfortunately, the parish has been unable to use email from the database program which keeps our registered parishioners. The problem apparently is a difficulty between our server, our Internet filtering program and the parish database software. Neither software consultants nor our own in-house technology people have been unable to find a solution to allow ParishSoft (our database company) to send emails to parishioners.

Email Addresses Rarely Tested

Our relatively new Ministry Scheduler software allows us to schedule and email our liturgical ministers and generate the weekend schedules, but only them. For all other emailings (including our Religious Education program), staff members have assembled various lists and done small emailings to their committee-sized groups. Sometimes email additions or corrections to these smaller lists do not make it back to the master database.

We'd like to use our email list more regularly, but it is out of date and many email addresses are untested.

When Do We Amend the Database ?

We amend the database when

• a US Postal service letter or packet of weekly contribution envelopes  is returned for wrong address, or the addressee has moved
• an email is undeliverable or bounces back
• someone moves out of the parish bounds and tells us
• someone chooses to register in another parish and tells us
• the parishioner asks us to do so
• reception of a sacrament of initiation, baptisms, weddings
• we celebrate a Mass of Christian Burial for a registered parishioner 
• we are informed by next of kin that a registered parishioner has died, or a friend requests a mass card for a deceased registered Holy Cross parishioner

New Diocesan Registration System Automatically Informs Parishes when a Registered Parishioner Changes Parishes

Within the last two years, the Diocese has connected all parishes in the Diocese of Trenton to one registration database which permits a family to be "registered" in one parish only. This prevents someone who changes residences from becoming unwittingly registered in more than one parish. It also automatically informs the former parish when someone "switches" parishes and registers elsewhere. Until very recently, registration data was generally not shared between parishes. 

Update e-mail list and new e-mail program

So please be patient with us as we update our email address list in order to us a new email system. People change their email addresses frequently and we may have an old one. Someone on our staff may even be using your correct email but the main database is inaccurate.

As we check up on the parish database, we will also inadvertenly email some people who never wanted to hear from us again or who have left the parish and/or the Catholic faith. Please tell such people to let us know and we will promptly adjust their record. If they want to speak to someone on the Parish Staff, it might be helpful for everyone concerned.  If we offend anyone by emailing someone who has died, we will say a mass in their memory. We don't want to make anyone angry. We want to quickly inform people who want to hear from us about important events in the parish, or for example, to receive the bulletin electronically just like the school families receive the Wednesday emailings from our school.

Peace,

Fr Manning

 P.S.  We are planning a methodical parish census to review and update all parish records around Christmas time and the move into our new church.