Connecting Church Community Builder

Your church already knows who these students are. If you use Church Community Builder, you can pull them into LockIn instead of typing them in one at a time.

What comes across

• Students — name, birthday, contact info, and whether they are active
• Parents and guardians — as real contacts, not just a name field on a kid
• How the family fits together — which parents go with which students, and which students are siblings

That last one is the part a spreadsheet cannot do. Export a group from CCB to a CSV and two siblings show up as two rows with the same email and the same phone number, with nothing in the file to say whether they are siblings, a parent and a child, or two unrelated people who happen to share a phone. Connecting CCB directly answers that, so your roster arrives with families already assembled.

What you will need

• Your church's CCB address — the part before .ccbchurch.com when you sign in
• Someone with Master Administrator access in CCB to approve it. If that is not you, it takes them about fifteen seconds.

You do not need to create an API user, tick a list of service permissions, or give LockIn your CCB password. If you have set up other tools with CCB before and remember doing all that, this is not that.

Connecting

1. Go to Settings, then Integrations
2. Type your CCB address and choose Connect
3. You will land on CCB's own sign-in page — sign in there and approve LockIn
4. You will come straight back to LockIn

Check your data before importing anything

Once you are connected, choose Check my data. This reads your CCB and reports what it found. It does not import anything and it does not change anything, in either system. It is worth doing, because it tells you what your import will actually look like:

• How many people and families are there
• How many have a birthday on file — this matters, see grades below
• Whether family relationships are filled in in your CCB. If a lot of people are not marked as parent or child, some students will come across without a parent attached, and it is better to know that before you import than after.
• Which students share a parent's phone or email

About grades and schools

CCB has no grade field and no school field. There is nowhere for that information to live in your church's system, so there is nothing for us to bring across. Where a student has a birthday on file, LockIn will suggest a grade — but it is a suggestion, and it is marked as one. You will get a short list of students to confirm after importing. It is worth the two minutes: grade decides which small group a student lands in, and a wrong guess puts a kid in the wrong room.

Students who share a parent's phone

This is common and completely normal. Plenty of middle schoolers do not have their own phone or email, so their CCB record carries a parent's. LockIn notices when a student's phone or email matches an adult in their family and marks that student as reach via parent. When you go to text them, you will see who actually owns that phone. Without it you would be texting a mum thinking you were texting her son.

What LockIn can and cannot do to your CCB

LockIn can only read. It cannot add, edit or delete anything in Church Community Builder. Nothing you do in LockIn will change your church's records. If you want student updates to flow back into CCB, that is not available yet. Export from LockIn and import into CCB for now.

Disconnecting

Go to Settings, then Integrations, then Disconnect. Your students and parents stay in LockIn. Disconnecting only removes LockIn's access to CCB — it never deletes your roster. You can reconnect later.

If something goes wrong

"That authorization link expired." The connection screen times out after about fifteen minutes. Start again from Settings, then Integrations. "The connection could not be completed." Usually the account approving it is not a Master Administrator in CCB. Check with whoever runs your church's CCB. The connection says "Reconnect". CCB access expires periodically, or someone revoked it on the CCB side. Choose Reconnect and sign in again. Your imported students are untouched. No Church Community Builder? Import a spreadsheet instead. Go to Fam, then Bulk add, download the template, fill it in and upload it.