Elvanto Syncing with Safe Ministry Check

We’re really keen to help churches reduce their administration overheads, and syncing with your Elvanto Church Database is one huge benefit of the Safe Ministry Check tool.

How does it work?

The purpose of the Elvanto Integration is to help keep your Elvanto Database accurate. This is designed to work in two ways…

  1. We ‘pull’ the names and other details of people who need to do the training or be screened from your Elvanto account.
    These names can get added to your Safe Ministry Check list and are always kept in sync with your Elvanto account as the ‘master’
  2. We ‘push’ a person’s training and screening details from our site to one of the custom Elvanto Fields you’ve setup.

If a “priority field” is empty, then the syncing action will use the minority field’s data. For example… if you’ve recorded in Elvanto that John Smith completed the training course on 1/12/2017, but we have no record of John Smith’s course, we’ll pull that data from Elvanto and use it in Safe Ministry Check. But if there was a more recent date John completed the course in Safe Ministry Check, then we’ll push that date into your Elvanto record for John.

Through this process, you can have the assurance that your Elvanto database is up to date and in sync with the results of your Safe Ministry Check account.

Getting Started

Once you create your Organisation Account with Safe Ministry Check, and get your account setup, go to your Elvanto account and navigate to the Elvanto Settings page. (Settings > Elvanto Syncing). Safe Ministry Check uses the most up to date security and integration system that Elvanto has on offer.

Note: You must have Super-Admin privileges in Elvanto to add the integration.

1. Go to your Elvanto Account > Settings > Integrations > Add Integration
2. Select ‘Safe Ministry Check’
3. Select ‘Click here to integrate with Safe Ministry Check’
4. You’ll be taken to the Safe Ministry Check login page… login as normal.
5. You’ll then be taken to the Elvanto login page… login as normal, and select ‘Allow Access’ to complete the connection.

This will make the bridge between your Elvanto Account and your Safe Ministry Check Account.

But don’t worry, nothing will happen until you do the next few steps.

Create a Group in Elvanto to keep synced

To help you make sure the right people in your church are being screened and trained, we suggest you create a special Group in your Elvanto account. You can call it anything you like, but it should be regularly updated to make sure it contains the all the people in your church who need to be screened. (You might want to set up a couple of People Views; e.g. “People in the Kids Team who are not in the Special Group”, or “People in the Group who are no longer in the kids team”).

When that Elvanto Group is ready, you will be able to select that group from the list of available groups on the Elvanto Syncing page in Safe Ministry Check.

Again, don’t worry. Nothing will happen yet either…

Sync Custom Fields in Elvanto

Safe Ministry Check is able to update certain people fields in Elvanto. So, if you don’t already have custom fields in Elvanto for recording people’s WWCC/Bluecard status and other records, you should create them (You can create custom fields by going to Elvanto > People > Categories > Select Any Category > Add Custom Field). You don’t have to use these names for your fields, but the data that gets synced is:

  • ‘Date Completed Most Recent Safe Ministry Course’,
    In Elvanto, your custom Completed Date field should be a ‘Date’ type field.
  • ‘Working with Children Check Number’,
    In Elvanto, your custom WWCC/BlueCard Number field should be a ‘Single Line text’ type field.
  • ‘Working with Children Check Status’
    In Elvanto, your custom WWCC/BlueCard Status field should be a ‘Single Line text’ or a ‘Drop down’ with at least the options of “CLEARED”, “PENDING”, “FAILED”, “EXPIRED”.
  • ‘Working with Children Check Expiry Date’.
    In Elvanto, your custom WWCC/BlueCard Expiry Date field should be a ‘Date’ type field.
  • ‘Leader Screening Status’
    In Elvanto, your custom Leader Screening Status field should be a ‘Single Line text’ type field.

Be sure to set these fields to “View only” in Elvanto. Safe Ministry Check will become the “source of truth” for your Safe Ministry Check data, and it will always overwrite any changes you might make in Elvanto.

To link these fields to Safe Ministry Check, go to the Elvanto Syncing page and select the Elvanto field that corresponds to each data type. If you don’t want to record one of these in Elvanto, that’s fine, just leave that syncing option as “none”.

If this is the first time you’ve set these up, nothing will happen yet.

Link People and Confirm Partial Matches

When your accounts are linked as described above, you should be able to select “Auto Match People“. This will search for any existing people in your Safe Ministry Check Account who are a perfect match for people in your Elvanto Account. It will link them automatically, and will start keeping them synced in the background (checking a couple of people off every day while we sleep).

Finally, select “See Matches and Partial Matches“. There you can view all your people and see who is synced, who could be synced and if there are people who are no longer in your Elvanto target group.