How 30 Churches Use CareNote Today
Here's how 30 churches are using CareNote today. Each write-up is a real congregation, described by the kind of church it is rather than by name, so you can find the one that looks most like yours.
Two things carry every write-up: interactions, the notes, visits, calls, texts, care reports and prayer requests a team records, and care requests, a need someone owns and closes. Find your shape below, then read how a church like yours runs it.
The problems CareNote solves for these churches
Intake: every way a need arrives lands in one place.
A need shows up through a lot of doors. Someone tells an usher on Sunday, an email arrives, a neighbor calls, a member fills out a form. CareNote is helping churches solve the intake problem with forms, email, text, phone and manual entry: a form on your website or in your Church Center app, an email you forward, a text or call to your Care Number, or typing it in. All of it lands as a care request and gets routed to the right person. Across these thirty churches you will see every one of those doors in use.
Assignment: stop coordinating by hand.
Assigning a visit used to mean calling everyone who said they would help, finding who is free, matching schedules, then telling the rest that someone else took it. Now you send the request to your care team. Each person gets one email with one button, I can help, and the first to click has it. The address only goes to the person who accepted. Volunteers are free, three for every paid seat, and they never need a login.
Documentation: the whole story of a person in one place.
Visits, calls, texts, prayer requests, care reports and notes sit on the person's record, in a timeline you can filter, print, or have summarized into a one-page care briefing before a visit. Volunteers file their report from a web page or by replying to an email, with no training. Nine of these thirty churches use CareNote for exactly this and nothing more, and it is a complete way to use it.
Follow-up: nobody falls through the cracks.
The Care Action Center shows what still needs assigning, what is overdue, who has not filed a report, and who in your church has not been contacted at all. One click sends a reminder by email, text or push. A request can be marked ongoing, so a family facing months of treatment stays open until you say it is done.
Meals and practical help, without the spreadsheet.
Care Table posts the dates a family needs meals, rides, groceries, childcare or errands. The congregation signs up with one click, sees the address only after signing up, and gets a reminder and a calendar link. The family can post updates, like too much pasta. People outside the church can be invited by email without being added to your database. Where these churches use it, every sign-up was confirmed.
Finding the helpers already in your pews.
SHAPE assessments identify the gifts, heart, abilities, personality and experience already in your congregation, and save to Planning Center. When a need comes in, CareNote ranks who fits it and drafts the email: the church has a need that lines up with how God has shaped you. You talk to them, and if it is a fit, you add them as a volunteer.
Intake-driven with a single coordinator
The most common shape, and the one CareNote was built around. One person owns care. Needs arrive by whatever route the church already has, the coordinator sorts and assigns, and volunteers do the visiting, calling and delivering. The volunteers rarely sign in. They accept the assignment from an email and file their report from an email, and the coordinator's queue closes itself. Few logins, many hands.
A large-congregation care team with seven staff seats and fifteen volunteers
- 332
- care requests opened, and every one closed
- 618
- pastoral touchpoints recorded
A church running a fellowship-and-check-in ministry with one coordinator and eleven volunteers
- 172
- care requests handled
- 208
- pastoral touchpoints recorded last month
A large church's care team run from a single paid seat with thirteen volunteers
- 85
- care requests handled
- 71 of 81
- assignments carried by volunteers
An Anglican parish whose volunteers do the visiting and report by email
- 251
- care requests handled
- 178 of 249
- assignments carried by volunteer visitors
A mid-size church with one care coordinator, eight email-only volunteers, and a prayer list that feeds everything
- 61
- care requests handled last month
- 224
- pastoral touchpoints recorded last month
A small church running a transportation and practical-help ministry with nineteen volunteers
- 107
- care requests handled
- 59 of 101
- assignments carried by volunteers
Whole-staff care desk
A different approach: instead of one coordinator and a volunteer bench, the church puts most of its staff into CareNote and each of them logs their own work. Everyone signs in, and the record is spread across many people. The trade is that needs are mostly entered by hand and the record depends on staff habit rather than on an automated loop.
A large church with a two-year care-follow-up habit
- 183
- care requests handled
- 616
- pastoral touchpoints recorded over two years
A large church using Huddle to bring lay leaders into a counseling-heavy caseload
- 45
- cases opened in three months
- 26
- care requests last month
A multi-campus church where the whole staff shares the care desk
- 36
- care requests last month, 25 of them straight from a form
- 132
- pastoral touchpoints recorded last month
A church with a rota-driven visitation team and twenty-five staff seats
- 1,610
- visitation schedules built
- 667
- visit assignments on the rota
Pastoral log
These churches never really adopted the care request queue, and it does not matter. They use CareNote as the durable record of pastoral contact: who was visited, who was called, who was prayed for, what was said. Some log thousands of touchpoints with barely a handful of care requests. For a solo pastor or a small staff, this is often the whole point, and several of these churches are among the most consistent users in this library.
A large church running a daily prayer digest off a membership export
- 129
- prayer requests recorded
- 110
- pastoral touchpoints recorded last month
A Reformed Presbyterian church where twenty elders and staff all log their own visits
- 492
- pastoral touchpoints recorded in eleven months
- 142
- visits logged, including home and hospital calls
A church using CareNote as a member check-in and milestone log
- 104
- pastoral touchpoints recorded, 46 of them last month
- 74
- milestones tracked
A multi-site church in Canada running a prayer and pastoral note log
- 582
- pastoral touchpoints recorded in eight months
- 287
- updates logged
A Baptist church whose pastor logs every visit and prayer request
- 222
- pastoral touchpoints recorded in seven months
- 96
- visits logged, fourteen of them last month
A mid-size church where several pastors share one pastoral notebook
- 313
- pastoral touchpoints recorded in five months
- 105
- prayer requests recorded
A small church logging visits and running a card and prayer ministry
- 51
- care requests handled in eight months
- 56
- visits logged, including hospital and home calls
A United Methodist congregation with a three-person pastoral log
- 259
- pastoral touchpoints recorded in fourteen months
- 31
- phone calls logged
A two-person visitation ministry covering twelve campuses
- 1,483
- visits logged over ten months
- 1,803
- pastoral touchpoints recorded
Form-driven intake
These churches put a form in front of the congregation and let it do the asking. A Planning Center form, a public web form or a monday.com form becomes the front door, an automation turns the submission into a care request, and staff work the queue rather than transcribing it. This is the shape with the most care requests relative to interactions, and the one where intake depends least on any individual remembering to type something in.
A Bible church running benevolence, counseling and marriage mentoring off an external intake form
- 253
- care requests handled
- 168
- of them created straight from the intake form
A community care team handling benevolence requests from a church-management form
- 20
- care requests last month, every one from a form
- 415 of 425
- care requests closed
A very large multi-campus church routing form submissions to twenty-five volunteers, with meal sign-ups and a Care Number
- 54
- care requests last month
- 342
- pastoral touchpoints recorded last month
A church whose entire care intake is one form answered by six volunteers
- 49
- care requests handled in their first full month
- 52 of 60
- care requests created straight from the form
A large church running a prayer list and check-in pipeline that writes back to Planning Center
- 29
- care requests last month, every one straight from the form
- 384 of 390
- care requests closed
New accounts still forming a habit
These six churches have fewer than six full months on CareNote, so their numbers show a starting position rather than a trend. They are here because what a church builds in its first weeks is telling: which features it reached for first, and what shape its care ministry is taking.
A church three months in, running a card ministry off life events
- 24
- care requests in three months, 20 of them closed
- 19
- of them triggered by a life event
A very large church that brought its care history over from a previous tool and is now two months into live use
- 5,658
- interactions brought over from their previous system
- 40
- care requests handled in two months
A non-profit care network one month in, logging field visits
- 63
- contacts recorded in the first month
- 8
- field visits logged
A multi-campus church in the Netherlands, three months in
- 14
- care requests opened in three months
- 7
- needs claimed from a group email
A small pastoral care ministry with one paid seat, three months in
- 22
- care requests handled in three months
- 53
- pastoral touchpoints recorded last month
A Free Church congregation two months in, with two people running everything
- 40
- care requests handled last month
- 42
- care requests in two months
Finding your church in these
Three questions will point you to your shape.
Who is going to own this?
If the honest answer is one person, start with the single-coordinator write-ups. Nineteen of these thirty churches run that way underneath, whatever their seat count says. What matters there is volunteers and email links, not more logins.
Where do needs come from today?
If they come from a form your congregation already fills out, connect that form to a care request and skip the transcription entirely. If they come from a prayer list, promote straight from the list. If they come from a pastor noticing something, manual entry is not a failure mode. It is how twenty-six of these thirty churches work.
Do you need a queue at all?
Nine of these churches run almost no care requests and get full value from the pastoral record alone. Starting there is legitimate, and the request queue is waiting when the volume arrives.
Which of these shapes is your church?
Book a demo and we will walk through the write-up closest to how your care ministry already works.