Checking Into Child Safety: a Q&A Between CDM+ and King’s River Worship Center
Pastor Chris Kimbo answers a few questions about their hi-touch partnership with CDM+. Several years ago, King’s River Worship Center in St. Albans, West Virginia began a journey to improve security and overall procedures for tracking children parents were entrusting to them during weekly services. After researching several options, they chose the Check-In/Check-Out (CICO) module offered through CDM+. Kimbro found the program user friendly, efficient, and easy to customize to meet the needs of a growing ministry.
Q – In a nutshell, can you tell us what happens when parents walk their children into your check in room? Certainly. CICO has given us the ability to check all children in a family in at the same time. We have our system configured using Event Sets that allow us to check in and
track students in our Infant Nursery, Toddler, Nursery, Preschool, and Children’s Church all at the same time. Gone are the days of having to go through the check-in process for each class and/or age group. If you have a toddler, a preschooler, and a fourth grader, once we hit confirm on an iPad, name tags for each child print on Dymo printers near the door of their individual classes.
Q – What is your process to check a child out? After the service, parents return the pickup tags to the check in room. We have a barcode printed on the bottom that our volunteers will scan using the iPad, then choose the adult that is checking the child out.
Q – What if they lost their pickup tag? Parents ask that question all the time. Our response is their child will be given Red Bull and a puppy to take home. This generally helps the parent keep the tag close. All joking aside, the process is simple, we keep the staffed check in screen open on the computers that allow us to choose the child and manually check the student out.
Q – Do you only use CICO for your children’s ministry? No, we use CICO for various meetings, classes, and events throughout the year. One example would be our annual church picnic. As families arrive, we are able to check the entire family in and create name tags for each family member. We programmed a second tag that prints showing their name, address, phone numbers, birthdate, and email address. We tell them to correct anything that needs correcting and drop it in a basket and we do drawings for gift cards throughout the picnic. This is a tremendous tool to help keep our database up to date, not to mention tracking event attendance.
Q – What type of church would you encourage to consider CICO? Any church! It doesn’t matter how large or small the church is or if they have one children’s class or a hundred. CICO gives you the ability to customize what you want to track and how you want to do it.
