For church staff
Run your church on HoW: the website, people, serving, messages and the store.
Getting started
- Sign in to HoW for the first timeAccept your church's invitation, sign in with a password or an emailed link, and set up two-step verification if your church asks for it.
- A tour of the staff dashboardWhat is where in the staff dashboard: the menu on the left, search, light and dark, your account menu, and why you may see fewer screens than a colleague.
- Invite your teamGive a colleague a login: invite them from Team with the roles they need, and link their login to their record in People.
Website and forms
- Edit a page: add, arrange and remove blocksEvery page on your website is a list of blocks: a welcome banner, your service times, a map, a sign-up form, a livestream.
- Choose your website's themeA theme is the whole design of your website: its layout, type and spacing.
- The Revival themeA clean, modern design with big centred headlines, rounded photographs and a header that stays in view.
- Live now: put your livestream on your websiteThe Live now block shows your livestream on any page of your website at your service times.
- Sermons: publish your messages with video, audio and notesAdd each sermon with its date, speaker, series, scripture, video, audio, notes and links, then publish it to your website, the member portal and your podcast.
- Your sermon podcast on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyTurn on your podcast and every published sermon with audio becomes an episode in Apple Podcasts, Spotify and any podcast app.
- Show a block only between datesAny block on a page can be set to appear and disappear on its own: an Easter banner from Palm Sunday to Easter Monday, a camp sign-up until registration closes, a "We're live" link at 10:00 on Sunday.
- Your own domainPut your HoW website on an address your church owns, such as `www.yourchurch.org`.
- Campus pages on your websiteEach campus gets a page on your website with its service times, address, map link and what is coming up, and a chooser at /campuses lists them all.
- Building a formA form lets visitors write to your church, or sign up for your emails and texts, from a page on your website without you publishing an email address.
- Form submissionsEverything visitors send through one of your website's forms arrives on that form's What people sent tab, newest first.
People and membership
- People and householdsPeople lists everyone your church knows; a person's record holds their contact details, household, tags, notes and history, and households group a family under one address.
- Tags and notesTags group people for lists and audiences; notes record what staff need to remember about someone, and a confidential note is for owners and administrators only.
- Membership pathwaysA pathway is your church's own series of steps toward membership, such as "Newcomers lunch", "Meet an elder" and "Membership class".
Groups
Events and check-in
- Events and their datesAdd an event once, give it dates (one, or repeating every week), and decide who can see it and whether people register.
- Event registrationsWho is coming to each date: members register in the portal and visitors on your website, staff register people, run the waiting list, take payments and mark who came.
- Visitors paying for events on your websiteA visitor can register for a paid event date on your website and pay by card, with any add-ons, without an account. The place is held while they pay.
- The check-in stationOpen a date at the door, find a family, check children into their rooms, print their labels and the guardian's tag, and check them out only with the matching code.
- Check-in roomsCheck-in → Rooms is where you add the rooms children check in to, with the ages each suits and how many it holds.
Services
- Volunteer seasonsA season is the stretch of weeks you ask volunteers for, such as "Autumn 2026": you add its dates (plans), put people on them, and send each person one request for the whole season.
- PositionsA position is a role on a serve team, such as Greeter on the Hospitality team or Sound on the Production team.
- The scheduleThe schedule is the grid for one season: its dates (plans) run across the page and your positions run down it, grouped by team.
- Blockout datesBlockout dates are the days a volunteer can't serve, such as a family vacation or a work trip.
- My schedule: serving at more than one churchMy schedule in your church's member portal shows every date you serve, at every church you belong to, with the church named on each.
- Busy at another churchA ring on a volunteer's name, or a notice in Add, tells you they are already serving at another church at that time, if they chose to share it.
Communications
- AudiencesAn audience is a saved set of filters, such as "Members at the North campus" or "Everyone tagged Youth parents", that a campaign sends to.
- Campaigns: email and textA campaign sends one email or one text to everyone in an audience, such as "Youth parents" or "Downtown campus members".
- Email sendersAn email sender is who your church's emails appear to come from, and where replies go: the church itself, a ministry such as "Youth ministry", or a person such as your pastor.
- Text-to-joinText-to-join lets a newcomer text one word, such as JOIN, to your church's number and get a friendly reply asking them to confirm, then a confirmation with a personal link to your sign-up form.
- Texting inboxThe texting inbox collects the texts people send to your church's texting number, one conversation per person, and sends your answers.
- Agreement to texts and email, and STOPHoW sends a campaign text or email only to adults who have said yes to that kind of message, and it records each yes or no per person, per channel, with when and where it came from.
- Pilot textingWhile DCX Logic has pilot texting on for your church, your texts go out from DCX Logic's pilot number, signed DCX Logic HoW Test, and reach only people who agreed to your texts and joined the pilot themselves.
- Text us on your websiteA Text us button on every page of your website: visitors leave their name, mobile number and message, it arrives in your texting Inbox, and you answer by text.
Store and payments
- Connecting StripeEvent fees, event add-ons and the store are paid into your church's own Stripe account.
- RefundsYou can give money back on a store order, on event add-ons, or on a paid event registration, in full or in part, without opening Stripe.
- Store productsProducts are what your church sells to its members: shirts, books, mugs, meal tickets, camp extras.
- Store ordersStore → Orders lists everything bought in the portal's Shop or on your website's Shop, and the add-ons chosen with an event.
- Event add-onsAdd-ons are extras members can buy with an event registration, such as a retreat shirt or a lunch, and pick up at the event.
- The Shop on your websiteYour church website shows what your store sells on a Shop page. Visitors buy by card without an account, and members can still buy in the member portal.
Reports
- ReportsFour reports about your church, each for a date range and, if you have more than one campus, for a campus: attendance, participation, registrations and messaging.
- Attendance reportHow many people came, week by week, with first-time guests and children checked in, for a campus and a date range.
- Participation reportHow many of your people are in a group, serving on a team, in both, or in neither, and who the people in neither are, so you know whom to invite.
- Registrations reportEvery event date in a range against its capacity: who registered, who is waiting, who came, guests, and paid and unpaid places.
- Messaging reportEach email or text campaign scheduled or sent in a range: how many were delivered, how many failed, who opted out, and why some were never sent.
Account and settings
- Your planEvery church on HoW is on one of three plans: Core, Pro or Elite.
- Your team: who can sign in, and what they can doTeam lists everyone who can sign in to your church, with their roles and campuses; it is where you invite someone with their roles, change what they can do, and suspend or remove a login.
- One email, one church's staff accessOn HoW an email address has staff access at one church. Someone who works at two churches uses a different email at each; members and volunteers use one email everywhere.
- Custom rolesA custom role is a role your church builds itself when the built-in roles give someone too much or too little.
- Staff limited to their campusesIn a multi-campus church, a staff member can be limited to the campuses they work with.
- Your campus in the member portalMembers pick their home campus in the portal; groups and events at that campus then come first, and everything open to all campuses still shows.
- Your church's time zoneYour church's time zone is the clock HoW reads your church's times on: service times, event times, schedules, the website's Live now block and the dates in your reports.
- Sign-in addresses on your church's own domainLet staff sign in at dash.yourchurch.org and members at members.yourchurch.org. HoW's own addresses keep working, and bookmarks keep working.