Setting up your organization

Every church on Ecclora runs inside its own organization: an isolated space for that church's people, records, and staff. This page walks through what happens between requesting access and your team's first day using the platform.

1. Your organization is created

After you request access, your organization is set up on Ecclora with your church's name and country. Your country determines your default currency and regional settings automatically, so this is worth getting right from the start (you can change it later in Organization Settings).

Your organization gets its own address on the platform in the form of a subdomain, and your first administrator account is created and invited by email.

2. Your first login

The invite email links to a page where you set your password. Once you're signed in, you land on the Dashboard, which will look mostly empty until you start adding people, campuses, and activity, that's expected for a brand-new organization.

3. Set up your campus

Every organization starts with at least one campus. If your church meets at a single location, you're already set. If you run multiple locations, add each one under Campuses before you start adding people, so you can assign members and attendance to the right campus from day one.

4. Invite your team

Add the staff and volunteers who'll help run the organization under Roles & Access. Each person you invite gets one or more roles that scope what they can see and do, and for member and attendance roles specifically, that access can be scoped down to a single campus.

Start with fewer roles than you think you need. It's easier to grant a staff member more access later than to figure out who has access to what after the fact.

5. Bring your people in

Add your congregation under People. If you're moving from a spreadsheet, plan to import your existing records rather than re-entering everyone by hand, ask your administrator contact about your options if you have an existing member list.

6. Organize your departments and groups

Set up the departments your church already runs (worship, ushering, media, and so on) and any small groups your members belong to. Assigning people to these as you add them is faster than doing it as a separate pass later.

What's next

Once your organization, campus, team, and people are in place, you're ready to start recording attendance, planning events, and tracking giving. If your church wants a public website, that's covered in Site Builder.