When I became a counselor in the Elders Quorum Presidency in my ward, we originally called District Leaders to help get our Hometeaching reporting figured out. After a couple months and the Presidency having to do the work of the District Leaders, I investigated online hoping to find some sort of HT reporting tool that had been created. I found Returnandreport.org and found its features to be invaluable to keeping track of hometeaching without having to call, leave voicemails and ultimately guess whether those who had not reported did their hometeaching or not.
We have seen a steady increase in our Hometeachers simply checking off the names of the people they did and didn't visit. For the first time, our Bishop is able to see within a few days of the first part of the month a very accurate view of hometeaching for the previous month and he has already set goals to improve on our current percentage.
I can't say that it was the most intuitive process getting started with the site, but Brad has seriously done an amazing job addressing feedback and there has been alot of steady improvements that keep me and I'm sure many others using the site.
I even created a link to give a central location for instructions to my E.Q. Quorum on how to use R&R.org which I think should be helpful over time. I send this link out every month along with the new assignments as we update them to help new Elders get up to speed with the system and how we report hometeaching.
The instructions are here:
http://www.jakesargeant.com/hometeachin ... index.html
I believe there still can be many things done to streamline the process of using this online system, but my biggest desire would be to find a way to assign and organiaze hometeaching through the actual R&R.org website (meaning you wouldn't have to be on the single computer with MLS at the church) and then simply upload this back into MLS. I know this sounds like I'm probably asking alot, but with the Church's cooperation, I think this could come about. I'm just going to presume though that alot depends on the Church and their willingness to put more development behind MLS and how it exports and imports data to other programs.
Those are my main comments for now. Thanks Brad for singlehandedly creating a system that has truly transformed how we track and monitor hometeaching in our ward.
-Jake Sargeant-