What is CCB?
"CCB" stands for Church Community Builders
This is a tool that assists our staff and church body to efficiently communicate and coordinate logistics in ministry, freeing us up to focus more time and attention towards loving people. CCB can also function as your online/mobile directory. If you are regularly involved at Grace Church of DuPage, and have filled out the friendship register on a Sunday morning, then you have your own login and password that you can use to access the features in CCB. The features and functions of CCB are vast and in many ways exceed our communication needs or don't align directly with our communication goals. However, there are many benefits to using CCB that allow us to coordinate and communicate well with each other, so we encourage you to try it out and see how it can benefit you as you seek to love God with all your heart and love others. Login here using the email you provided us using the Friendship Register or have updated in the Directory or scroll down to preview further uses of the software.
What can I use CCB for?
SEARCH FOR PEOPLE
CCB has a great mobile site that allows you to search for an individual and click to get direction to their house or call/text their mobile device. It may be useful to you to save this page to the home screen (where all your apps appear) on your device for quick access. Learn how to do this on an iPhone or on an Android device.
COMMUNICATE WITH MY GROUPS AND MINISTRY LEADERS
In CCB you can view the groups that you are a member of, message your group members and leaders directly, find their contact information, view other group members, see files uploaded by group leaders, and respond to needs and serving requests. Our Buildings & Grounds Crew uses CCB to manage church projects and building maintenance. You can also browse groups and volunteer to serve with groups or request to join them in CCB.
VIEW OR SYNC YOUR CCB CALENDAR TO YOUR DEVICE
See events and ministry group functions specific to you and your involvement at church. This will include events that won't always appear on the public church calendar. You can also sync your device calendar to this calendar.
VIEW THE PUBLIC CHURCH CALENDAR
See events that pertain to the entire church body and the general public. This is a great way to get a general snapshot of our body life together, however, we would reccommend that if you are going to sync your calendar with the church calendar, that you do not subscribe to this public calendar, but to your personalized CCB calendar.
FIND EVENT SIGN-UP FORMS AND REGISTRATION FORMS
This is the easiest way to register for an event and/or to submit a payment or donation for an upcoming event. Also included are forms you can use to communicate with the church leadership regarding your interest in baptism, church membership, or requesting prayer on a specific matter.
SET-UP RECURRING GIVING
The Grace Church Membership Covenant calls and invites us to “a faithful stewardship of our money through cheerful and regular giving, and with the devoted use of our time and giftedness, thus to spread the gospel through all the nations.” Cheerful and regular giving of our first fruits for the advancement of Christian mission and for the sake of love to neighbor, both locally and globally, is an evidence of God’s gracious and saving presence in our lives (2 Cor 9:6–8) and is a fundamental aspect of worshiping the Lord (Prov 3:9).
How can I use CCB as a group or ministry leader?
DOWNLOAD THE IPHONE APP OR THE ANDROID APP
CCB has developed an amazing mobile app that can help you as a group leader to communicate better with your group members. You can send messages and group texts straight from your phone. You can also view group members, their contact information and addresses, birthdays, and profile info as well. Use the app to click to get directions to their house or call them up to see how they are doing. Calendar and event management is coming to the app soon.
SEND A GROUP TEXT FROM YOUR COMPUTER OR YOUR PHONE (IPHONE OR ANDROID)
If you have information that you need to get out to all of your group members quickly, texting is the way to go. CCB even now is working to improve this feature to make it easier to manage from your phone and to allow for two way group texting. For now though, this is a one-way form of communication from group leaders to group participants. Replies are not accepted at this time. There are three settings that need to be enabled in order for this to work correctly– (1) Group members must have their mobile phone number and carrier listed in their profile, (2) Group members must have their communication settings enabled to recieve text messages from that particular group, and (3) the group settings must be "Members Interact" type of group as well as enabled to allow for group leaders to make changes to their group members' profiles.
ADD OR REQUEST CALENDAR EVENTS, MANAGE YOUR EVENTS, RESERVE ROOMS/RESOURCES, AND SEND EVENT INVITATIONS
CCB helps us keep from over-booking rooms and resources in our church building. It also helps facilitate communication and begin the process of scheduling/coordinating events with the rest of the church calendar. This is the first step when wanting to host or promote a group ministry event or function. It is required if you are planning to use the church building and highly recommended if you would like help promoting the event and inviting others in the church body to participate. Once the church office has the details on your event in CCB, we can begin to explore the best ways to spread the word using our website, social media platforms, and printed communications.
SEND A GROUP MESSAGE FROM YOUR COMPUTER
Rather than keeping an email list in gmail or trying to keep track of all the contacts in your group, you can use CCB to manage the participants of your group all in one place. This will keep the history of the message thread of all the communication sent to that group members and participants. Messages will be sent to group members in the form of an email. Group members do not need to know how to use CCB nor do they need to login to reply to the group message. They can reply simply by replying to the email as a normal message. The CCB system will recognize that and manage the reply based on the settings you choose–as the group leader, you can control who the email responses go to, whether responses go directly to you or the whole group, or if you don't want any replies, you can choose to "not allow replies".
CREATE AND SHARE A LIST OF "NEEDS" THAT PEOPLE CAN SIGN-UP TO FILL
CCB has a great feature that allows ministry leaders to manage a list of needs and send that list out for people to sign-up to fill those needs. You can include a description of that need, set a time for when it is needed by, and invite your group members to click on an easy link in an email to view the list and sign-up right there. This can be especially helpful in coordinating meals, donating or borrowing items for an event, or creating a shared shopping list for a team to coordinate who is covering which area/item, etc.
CREATE A SIGN-UP OR REGISTRATION FORM, COLLECT RSVP'S, AND/OR COLLECT DONATIONS OR REGISTRATION FEES - CONTACT THE CHURCH OFFICE AT INFO@GRACEDUPAGE.ORG
CCB allows us to build forms that can integrate directly with your groups. Form recipients can be added to groups or an RSVP list (which you can message and begin communicating with). Payments are integrated with our specific budget line-items and the financial software that our business manager uses to manage finances and generate financial reports. You can also use forms to collect necessary contact information, parental consent/approval, opinions and feedback, and other information pertinent to your event or ministry function.