Events in MinHub Kids

In Children's ministry, small churches or church plants may only have one room for their children to gather, but most ministries create separate rooms for their kids to gather, learn, worship, fellowship, etc. There are also a lot of security issues around checking kids in and out, contacting parents that are probably in another room and making sure that any issues are documented.

MinHub Kids makes it easy to create rooms and services for your event types, kiosks for family check in with name tag and claim tag printing as well as recording ministry moments.

For the sake of simplicity, all scheduled large group gatherings are referred to as Events. These have an event type that group and categorize events for smart filters and stats. Attendance is taken at these events, and quick stats are provided per each service if you happen to have multiple services.

Ministry moments on the other hand are recorded during a service or after the fact. These will typically involve just a few people. Ministry moments might be about some disciplinary action, a decision to follow Christ or even just prayer with a kid. Tracking these ministry moments creates a ton of useful information in growing ministries, especially the ability to see which leaders have connected with certain kids throughout the year and creates a record of what happened at your events in case those need to get revisited down the road.

Warning: some of the functionality listed here is only available for Events Admin. If you aren’t seeing some of these options, talk to the leader of your ministry about possibly administrating the events tab.

Adding Events

Adding an event is fairly straight forward. Tap on the Events tab. Then tap on the + button on the top of the screen. This will prompt you to create either an Event or to record a Moment. We will cover Moments later. For now, tap Event.

The first field asks for an Event Type. These Event Types help categorize events. Think of them as your main programs. Maybe you have Sunday school, VBS, and summer camps. Whatever types of events your ministry creates will be the types of events that are created for this field. Once your types have been entered, you will rarely enter a new one. But at the beginning, you’ll have to create one for each new event.

You can tap + NEW EVENT TYPE and fill out the fields on the Add Event Type screen.

First, enter the name of the event type.

Then, select how many services this type of event has. You can add up to 5 services. If you have more than 5 service, you will need to create an additional event (like Sunday morning has 4 services and Sunday evening has 2 services). If you tap on the white row for each service, you can rename the service to fit your ministry.

Next, select how many rooms you use for this event. You can add up to 8 rooms. You can name each room (Nursery, Toddlers, Elementary, etc.). If you leave the name blank, they will just be called Room 1, Room 2, etc. For each room you will need to select a classification. Either an age range or a grade range.

Once you've named your event type and finished setting up services and rooms, tap CREATE. 

This new event type will be automatically selected after creating it. You can tell it is selected because it is blue. If you are adding an event and you already have the correct event type, just select that event type.

The Name of the event will automatically reflect the event type because this is often the case, but can easily be edited just by tapping on it.

Next, for each service you will need to select the Date and Time that the event will start and end. When you set the first time, the rest of the times will automatically jump forward at one hour per service with 30 minute gaps between. This is just to get you in the vicinity of where your services will be, but you should edit each one. Just make sure the start time is set first so that you don't mess up other times that you've set.

Finally you will select a repeating option. If it is a one-time event, you can leave the default Repeat option at Never. Otherwise, tap on the final box to have the event repeat. The repeat options are Never, Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. If you have events that repeat every other week or something unique like that, the easiest way to do that is to set them to repeat every week and then delete the events that you don’t need. Never is selected by default.

The next option is to choose an end for your repeating event. Select an end date in the future that is reasonable (most ministries schedule a semester or year at a time).

The last step is to tap Create >.

As you create more and more events and event types, the horizontal scrolling events bar will get cluttered. Tapping on an Event Type beneath the calendar dates will only show events in only selected event types.

On the day of your event, to view the details of the event, tap on the event icon in the top section of the Events tab.

In order to take attendance in any given room, tap on the room name first and that will load an attendance screen. By default, the first service will be first. If you tap on the blue date icon in the upper left that shows the Service name and time, it will toggle to any additional services. When a service is over, just tap on that icon to start taking attendance for the next service.

Tapping on a person’s photo will add a checkmark, indicating that they are present at the event.

The two icons in the upper right toggle between viewing your people in a list or a grid. The grid view show more people on the screen with first names, but the list view shows full names.

Tapping on the funnel icon will allow you to filter the people on the screen. This is especially helpful as the database grows but the event, service, or room is only for a specific demographic. In addition to filtering by people data, any shared managed group will appear as a filter option as well. Tapping on multiple filters from one section will group together, but from other sections will filter further. For instance, tapping on grades K + 1 + 2 will show all of the kids in those grades. Adding the filter Female will show all of the kids in those grades that are also female, not all of your the kids in those grades AND all of your female kids.

Tapping on the magnifying glass will allow you to search the list by first name, last name, or nickname.

You can add kids or whole families while taking attendance in a room, but the best experience is actually through the Kiosk mode (see below). If you add a kid or a family from the attendance screen, the kid(s) will be marked as present for that service in that room automatically.

While taking attendance, you can quickly identify which kids might have special needs, allergies, have some other notes that leaders need to be aware of, or if they need to be omitted from photos through small orange badges that appear on each kid's photo.

After marking a kid as present, if you tap their checkmark a second time, you will see a screen that gives you a few options. You may need to contact a parent or the emergency contact, so that information is available. You can mark the kid as checked out and note who picked them up. If it wasn't a parent, you can record the name and contact info for the other person (for liability purposes). A record of this is saved in the kid's attendance history just in case it is ever needed along with the time that they were checked out. You can also check an orange box on the lower left if you just accidentally marked them as present and want to remove their check mark.

After a kid is checked out, their photo or icon will switch to a solid orange circle with a check mark so that you can quickly see all of the kids that still need to get checked out. Once a kid is checked out, they cannot be checked back in. Checking them out requires indicating which parent or the name of another person that has picked them up.

Tapping Done > will record the attendance into memory.

Events that have already ended will show the event details, the attendance count and a few different quick stats for each service. Tapping on a room name will show a quick view of the attendance for that room and you can tap the blue icon to flip through services as needed. Tapping on the file symbol will generate a report of the students (and optionally leaders) that were marked present at the event.

You can enable Kiosk mode by visiting the ••• screen and tapping on Manage Kiosk Mode. After toggling Kiosk mode on, you will see that there are a few settings that you can customize. You can add a name for the church or ministry to display on the Kiosk mode screen. You can also enable name tag printing and whether or not you should enable numbers for kids (some churches use random numbers to alert parents in the sanctuary of a need in the kid's ministry).

While the above Kiosk settings will be saved across all of your devices, each device will need to select a kiosk printer individually if it is used to print name tags and claim tags.

You can access Kiosk mode by tapping on an event and then tapping on Kiosk mode. This is great for greeters, but because a staff member is logged in, it is possible to edit the database and change information. On the staff login screen, you can tap on the MinHub Kids logo and it will automatically load the Kiosk screen for the next/current event.

After kids/families check in, they will still need to be marked as present in the room that they are in for the service.

In the filters section of the room attendance screen you can filter for all of the kids that have checked in. As soon as they check in, they will show up in the attendance list for that room. This is especially helpful when your check in kiosk is in a foyer or greeting area and you also want to make sure that the kid has arrived in the correct room after checking in.

While viewing an event’s detail screen, tapping Edit in the upper right corner will allow you to edit the event. Event info that can be edited includes the type of event, the name of the event, as well as the start and end time of the event. If you edit the start or end time of the event, make sure to check the other as well. Changing a date or time on one field does not update the other. They both must be edited manually.

Make sure to tap Save > when you are done editing anything in this screen. Tapping < Cancel will revert to the way it was before you edited the event.

When you tap Save >, if the event is part of a series of repeating events, you will have the option to update just the one event, all future events in the series, or all events, which includes events in the past.

In order to edit attendance, you will first need to select the room (and then tap the blue date icon to select the correct service if needed) and then tap Edit. This will give you the attendance screen back to check off more people, add kids, or remove checks. Once a kid is checked out, their attendance cannot be updated.

Recording Ministry Moments

There are a couple ways to record ministry moments. The first is to go to the Events tab, tap on the + button at the top of the screen and select Moment. From there, you give the moment a title, record the date and time, and select who was involved, kids, parents and/or staff.

The logged in staff member is automatically added to the ministry moment when recording a ministry moment from

Another way to record a ministry moment is through the detail screen of a person. To do this, tap on the People tab and tap on a person to view their details. At the bottom, if you have permission for viewing this person, tap on the button that says Events for kids and Ministry Moments for parents. While in the Ministry Moments section, tapping the + button will allow you to quickly record a ministry moment that includes the currently logged in staff person as well as that kid or parent that you are viewing.