Care Intake
Care cannot start until it reaches you
Ask most pastoral care tools what they do and the answer is documentation. They give you a good place to write down the visit you already made. That is genuinely useful, and it is also the last third of the job. Nothing gets written down until someone finds out, and finding out is still happening in hallway conversations, forwarded emails, a note on a communication card, and a voicemail nobody hears until Monday.
CareNote starts a step earlier. Intake is the first thing you get, before you have entered a single note, because the doors are already open the day you sign up. Care reaches you five ways. Every one of them lands in the same place, opens a care request, and tells your team.
Intake
Five ways for a need to reach your church.
Assignment
Clear ownership, to a person or to a whole team.
Documentation
The report, the care story, the follow up task.
Most pastoral care software does the third one. CareNote does all three, and it is the first one that changes your week.
Five doors into one system
Your congregation is not going to change how it asks for help. Someone will always call. Someone will always fill out the card. Rather than teaching a congregation a new habit, CareNote opens the doors they already use.
Voice
Care Number add-onThey call and speak
A congregant calls your pastoral care number and says what is happening in their own words. CareNote transcribes the voicemail, reads it for the person and the need, opens a care request, and notifies your team. Staff and volunteers can call the same number to file a report instead of typing one.
Text
Care Number add-onThey send a text
The same number receives texts. A congregant writes in, gets a warm reply confirming their message reached a person, and the message is queued for your team. Staff texting from a registered phone get something different: the number answers commands, so they can accept an assignment or file a report by text.
They send an email
Your church gets its own CareNote address. Anything sent to it, or forwarded to it, is read for the person and the need and turned into a care request. This is the path for the care that arrives the way it always has: someone emails the office, and the office forwards it on.
Form
CareNote PlusThey fill out a form
Congregants request care themselves from a page on your website. CareNote has its own form builder, so you can publish a care request form or a prayer request form and embed it on your site. If you already run forms in Planning Center, those submissions can flow in the same way, with no rebuilding.
By hand
Included in CareNoteYou enter it yourself
The conversation in the parking lot, the handwritten card from Sunday, the name a board member mentions. You open a care request and type it. This path costs nothing extra and works on day one, and it is still the one every church uses most in its first month.
What happens after it arrives
Every door leads to the same hallway. However the need came in, this is what CareNote does with it.
Matched to a person
CareNote looks for the person in your congregation and attaches the request to their profile, so it joins everything already known about them.
Opened as a care request
A category, a due date, and the need in the words the person actually used. The same record whether it arrived by phone or by hand.
Your team is told
The people who should know find out immediately, rather than the next time someone opens the software.
Someone owns it
Assign it to a person, or offer it to a whole group and let the first available caregiver accept from their email or by text.
The visit is documented
The caregiver files a report from a link in their email, or by calling it in. It lands on the care story where the request began.
The follow up is kept
Check back in two weeks becomes a task with a date and an owner, instead of a promise that depended on somebody remembering.
You do not need another system to make this work
CareNote supplies the form and the phone number itself. You do not have to run Planning Center, or any church management system, to open all five doors. A chaplain in private practice, a church plant meeting in a school, a counseling ministry with no database at all: each can publish a form, claim a number in their own area code, and have real intake running the same week.
If you do run Planning Center, nothing is wasted. Your people stay in sync, your existing forms keep working, and CareNote adds the assignment and follow up that a database was never built to do.
Why this is not just a longer feature list
This is the difference that is hard to see on a feature list. A documentation tool asks you to bring it information. CareNote goes and gets it. Intake, assignment, and documentation are one continuous motion instead of three systems you hold together by memory.
Compare CareNote and NotebirdWhat each path needs
Entering care by hand is included with every CareNote account. The automated doors are add ons, so you can open the ones your congregation actually uses.
| Intake path | What it needs |
|---|---|
| Entered by hand | Included in CareNote |
| Web form on your site | CareNote Plus |
| Planning Center form | CareNote Plus |
| Email to CareNote | CareNote Plus |
| Phone call and voicemail | Care Number add-on |
| Text message | Care Number add-on |
CareNote Plus is priced by the size of your team. The Care Number add on is a flat monthly or yearly cost and includes your own number in your local area code. See pricing for current figures.
Ready to open every door into your care ministry?
Start a free CareNote trial or book a demo to see how a call, a text, an email, a form, or a note typed by hand all become care your team can act on.