Tech Forum

The bishop asked me to mark a member, who is moving out soon, contact Previous Bishop. I know I can do this when I send a record out but what about a record that could be pulled by a new ward. Any way to mark it in LCR?

You can set the "Contact Prior Leader" flag to Yes when entering the move membership out transaction; or
you can place a "Move Restriction" on the the member record which will prevent the record from being moved until the "Move Restriction" is removed.
With a "Move Restriction" in place, a unit requesting the record will get a popup informing the user of the move restriction and displaying current leader's name and contact information.

There is no way that I know of to flag a record for "Contact Prior Leader" in advance of actually moving the record out.

The only other alternative I'm aware of is to watch the transactions and when the record moves out, contact the unit leader.

After calling the Global Support Center, there is still no way to set up the "Contact Prior Leader" in advance before another unit requests the records. They informed me to place a move restriction, which I did, but that's an inefficient workaround because it prevents the membership record from getting sent to a new unit. That's not helpful to either unit. It would be more effective to allow a unit to set up the Contact Prior Leader in advance.

Personally, I can see a certain advantage to it working the way it does. As it stands, annotations are easy to miss. If a "contact prior" flag was implemented in a similar way, it could be overlooked. Even if seen, it could be easily forgotten. And what would cause the flag to be reset to show that conversation took place?

With a move restriction, nothing happens until the bishops talk and the old ward removes the restriction. The lack of a record should prevent the member from receiving a calling (for which they might not be worthy). The missing record should be an ongoing reminder to the new ward that something needs to be done.

The current system strikes me as "fail safe".

The biggest hassle is getting the bishops to talk - but that has to happen regardless of the procedure used.

mattprasmussen wrote:It would be more effective to allow a unit to set up the Contact Prior Leader in advance.

Isn't this effectively what a move restriction does? It effectively forces the new unit to talk to the old unit before the record can be moved.

The only real difference between a move restriction and what you're suggesting is that is forces the contact to happen BEFORE the member record is moved instead of the contact possibly (maybe, if someone happens to print the record move report and hand it to the bishop and he remembers to initiate the contact) happening after the record is moved.

russellhltn wrote:The biggest hassle is getting the bishops to talk

This is our concern as well. Some bishops are hard to contact due to work or travel. A previous leader of mine simply would not answer his phone if he didn't already have the number programmed into the phone or caller ID showed it was someone he knew. And he would not set up his voicemail. It caused at least three issues with funeral homes trying to contact him for funeral arrangements.

You make a good point that an annotation can be overlooked and the move restriction ensures that the new leader becomes informed.

Can't design systems for extreme outliers. People who decide to be outliers be decision must make up the difference themselves.