What your church sees in the app

churchHQ is the member side of Scout. Your congregation reaches it two ways: the churchHQ app from the App Store or Google Play, or your church's link opened in a phone browser. This is a tour of what they land on, so you know what you're promising when you announce it.

The five tabs

A floating bar sits at the bottom of every screen with five tabs, always in this order.

• Home is the greeting, the quick-action tiles, and whatever is actually happening for that person this week.
• Updates is the feed of posts from the church, from teams, and from groups. Each card carries the author, an audience label, the time, the body, and a Got it button, with filter chips across the top. A member who leads a team or a group also gets Post and Sent in the header, so lay leaders can post to their own people without a staff login. The tab shows an unread count, and opening the feed clears it.
• Schedule is My Schedule, split into Upcoming and History. Upcoming cards show the date, position, service time, team, and the teammates who have already confirmed, plus Confirm and Decline while the slot is still requested. History shows the year's serving tally and a reflection prompt on past serves.
• Groups is My Groups and Browse. Browse searches your published, active groups that the person isn't already in.
• Give is Give, History, and Recurring. If your church collects gifts on its own page instead of through Scout, this tab opens that page in the phone's browser.

Two screens have no tab of their own. Events is reached from the Home dock tile or the Upcoming Events card. Profile is behind the avatar in the top right.

The home screen

Your church's logo sits top left (your church's name, if you haven't uploaded one), and the member's avatar top right. Below that, a time-of-day greeting (Good morning, / Good afternoon, / Good evening,) over their first name. The greeting appears on Home only.

Under the greeting is the quick-action dock: four tiles reading Connect, Groups, Events, Give. Connect opens a sheet titled How can we help? with four options: I'd like to serve, Share a prayer request, I'm interested in baptism, and I'd like to talk about faith. All four write to your staff side. A prayer request becomes a pastoral note flagged as prayer; the other three also tag the person and open an assigned follow-up with a due date.

Below the dock, the screen forks.

A person with nothing yet (no serving slot, no recurring gift, no groups, no upcoming events) sees one card, Get connected at {your church name}, with the subtitle "A few good ways to jump in." and three rows: Find a group, Serve with us, Set up giving.

Everyone else sees the stack: the serving card (You're serving: {position}), then Upcoming Events, then My Groups. The moment any one of those has something in it, the whole stack renders with its own empty states.

One nudge, never a pile

There is room for exactly one nudge above the dock. Scout renders the highest-priority one that applies and drops the others:

1. How did {group name} go?, the group-leader reflection banner, live for 72 hours after a meeting.
2. An unopened church update, shown as the sender's name and a preview line.
3. Add a profile photo.
4. Everyone's good at something, the skills nudge, which only comes up once a photo exists.

A Kids pickup is open banner sits above all of that, and only for volunteers you have added to the pickup team while a check-in session is running.

What Home tells a member about themselves

Nothing about their standing. No engagement score, no status pill, no risk flag, no note about a gap in participation. Scout's statuses are staff-side only, and no member surface reads them.

The one place Scout's own voice appears in churchHQ is a notice card for confirmed team leads, and it is about other people on the team they lead. It is off for every church until an admin turns it on under Settings → Who hears what, and it never quotes a dollar amount. See Deciding who hears what.

Your logo and your color

Two fields under Settings → Church Info brand the whole app. Logo takes a wide PNG, JPEG, or WebP up to 2MB, and shows in the app header. Brand Accent takes one hex color, and that single value drives the tab bar, the dock tiles, the buttons, and the sign-in page. A very pale accent flips the header text to dark so it stays readable.

The profile behind the avatar

Tapping the avatar opens Profile. Members can edit First name, Last name, Phone, Address, City, State, and ZIP, then tap Save Changes. Email is read only ("Contact your church to update your email address."). They can also add or remove a photo, fill in About you (skills, availability, and how they're open to serve), turn off Be considered for new opportunities, pause themselves from serving under Need to step back?, mute individual teams or groups, set a password, and request account deletion. The household list is there but read only: "Household structure is managed by church staff."

The full walkthrough is in Notifications and profile.

What the app does not do

The gaps below are the ones people will ask you about, so say them out loud when you announce the app.

• No kids check-in. Parents cannot check a child in from their phone. The kiosk is the only check-in path. See Running the kiosk.
• No member-to-member messaging. There are no DMs and no group chat. Replies exist only inside an update thread, and a private reply goes to that post's author alone.
• No event detail page. The card in the Events list is the whole surface. There is no separate page per event and no custom registration form.
• No way to leave a group or a team. Joining a group is a request; leaving is not in the app. The team invite page even says "You can leave the team any time," and no leave button ships. Members have to ask a leader or the office.
• No notification inbox. Push notifications are fire and forget. A missed one lives on as the Updates feed, the schedule card, or the group banner, and nowhere else.
• No dark mode. The member app has one light palette.
• No giving statement download. The History tab is a list of gifts plus a year-to-date figure. Receipts are emailed at the time of the gift. Scout does not produce year-end statement documents at all, in the app or on the staff side. See Year-end giving records.

Where to go next

• Getting your church into the app covers how people create their account, which nobody can do on their behalf.
• Serving requests and the schedule
• Giving from the app
• Notifications and profile
• What members see of your groups