How Child Safety Software Helps Identify Vulnerabilities and Build Trust for Your Congregation’s Summer Programs

As summer approaches, many congregations are planning ways for children to enjoy fun and interactive faith-based learning experiences. But whether your program is a one-day event or multi-week camp or trip, safety is always a priority. And that means ensuring that all aspects of your program—from providing background checks for volunteers and making sure that individual children’s needs are met and parents remain informed, to managing a secure check-in and check-out process—are seamless and compliant. 

This is not only key to meeting your congregation’s obligations and local requirements, but to creating trust with parents and congregants who choose to participate in your programs. 

Here are 5 key questions to ask when planning your summer programs:  

1. Are your volunteers background screened? Screening volunteers is essential to ensure the safety and well-being of the children participating in your programs, as well as to safeguard your church’s reputation and mitigate any potential legal and financial risks. A platform that manages the screening and background check process can simplify volunteer verification while alleviating the need for church personnel to collect confidential information or handle sensitive data. It also automates the process by sending a secure notification through one of the nation’s leading background screening providers, to request that volunteers complete the background check process. This creates confidence in an experience where their information is handled with the upmost professionalism. A unified platform can also maintain the status of a volunteer’s background check, eliminating rework or uncertainty for future volunteer programs, and ensuring that information is always up to date.

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2. Do you have a secure check-in/check-out process for participants? Maintaining a secure check-in and check-out process is vital to ensure that all children are accounted for, that only authorized individuals are able to check kids out, and to create a trusted experience. Congregations have several options: Manual sign-in and sign-out, an automated platform or kiosk that allows parents and guardians to digitally sign or use a fingerprint for identification purposes, or maybe you prefer to automatically generate and email claim tickets to check children out after events. The method you choose is based upon the level of security risk that is right for your congregation, and the method that is most efficient and convenient for staff and parents. 

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3. Are you able to manage and track event spaces/rooms and staffing requirements? Preparing for summer programs requires allocating space and staff for activities. This can become time-consuming and complex when you have numerous volunteers staffing programs for multiple age groups in several event spaces throughout the summer. Regardless of the program, you need to ensure that an appropriate child:adult ratio is maintained, that event space and room occupancy does not exceed capacity, and that overflow staffing and space is made available when needed. This is where an automated platform can really help. With the ability to track all event rooms and set a limit on  the number of children allowed in each space, the system can notify staff when the limit is nearing, and assign additional resources or stop checking-in new children, thereby maintaining child safety and better management of resources.
   
   
4. Can you keep track of individual children’s needs? Often children have special needs or preferences that must be accommodated. From medication to food and environmental allergies, and other specific needs, staff should be made aware of these accommodations in order to keep children safe and comfortable. One way to facilitate and automate this is to leverage a platform that maintains this information and generates drop-off item tickets (medicines, special food, etc.) that ensure staff is notified and the child is tagged to avoid any potential issues. 

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5. Can you quickly and easily communicate with parents when needed? Weather that impacts outdoor activities, reminders that permission slips are due, children who aren’t feeling well—there are lots of unknowns when planning and managing summer programs. That’s why you need to be able to communicate with parents quickly and efficiently at all times. It’s also why an all-in-one platform makes it so much easier with the ability to create text groups to notify parents of important reminders and alerts, send emails with links to permission slips and information about activities, and reduce the burden on staff by streamlining communications.  

Servant Keeper: Focused on child safety and your program’s success

Successful summer programs start with thinking about how to ensure the safety and well-being of participating children. That’s why Servant Keeper helps ensure your ministry’s children’s areas are secure and compliant with a single platform to: 

• Quickly and accurately conduct background checks, update profiles, and receive notifications when background screens expire. 
• Provide fast and secure self-service check-in and check-out for parents to save time and free up staff for children.
• Equip teachers with information about children’s preferences and needs, and track spaces to manage child-to-teacher ratios. 

Discover how to identify vulnerabilities and build trust in your congregation’s summer programs. Learn more about how Servant Keeper helps children's ministries here.

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