Minnesota 4-H Management Software

One of the issues that is surfacing with the online re-enrollment process has been "how can I tell if a member is indeed re-enrolled?".

In the past, as you know, 4HPlus! would keep track of whether or not you changed anything about a member's address, phone, etc., or added projects. There is an automatic mechanism in 4HPlus! that would update the [Current Year] field to, in this case, [10].

It was the "add a project" trigger that was most commonly relied on - that is, when we removed all the projects at the end of the year, then you'd of course have to add their current projects, and that would trigger the update of the Current Year.

Now, we decided this year to keep all project enrollments intact - the idea is that members' enrollment persists - that is unless they drop a project, they are continuously enrolled in that project. Secondly, we had hoped to save Support Staff time by not having to just turn around and re-enroll members in projects that were just previously deleted - most kids have most of the same projects from year to year.

In 4HPlus!, this means that if a member has no project changes or contact info changes, you'll need to manually change the [Current Year] field on the Member's Registration screen.

In the online interaction - this gets tougher. Ideally, the member would have followed all the instructions and clicked on the correct button - which will update the [Current Year] field online, which then gets downloaded into 4HPlus! and all is good. But we know that not all members are completing the last step of re-enrollment and the [Current Year] field is not getting updated.

So - how do we tell? With the online stuff, we'll know who has filled out the Member Information Form - those will be obviously need to be updated to a [Current Year] of [10] if they are not already.

The toughest situations will be where the member goes online, reviews all their info and makes no changes to anything, does not complete the Member Information Form, but "intends" to re-enroll.

I've not fully thought this through - and your comments and ideas are very welcome - but here's a few thoughts.

1. In hindsight, it maybe was not the wisest choice to leave all projects in place - I suspect this may be reconsidered for next year.
2. An important indicator will be that Member Information Form. And really, if that's not filled out online, (nor a hard copy submitted) then has the member really re-enrolled?
3. We will need to add some more "controls" to 4h4me to more tightly direct a member who is online re-enrolling. An easy hole right now is that they can view the Member Information Form - enter no data - then hit [Prior Screen] and get "credit" for having completed that task.
4. I do think there will be ways to sort this all out - there are time stamps, logs and other clues (like for example, anyone with a cell phone carrier entered will clearly be a re-enrollee). This is one of those "messy" areas - but not unsolvable.