Deciding who hears what

As a church grows, "everyone on staff hears everything" stops being useful. Scout lets you say who a notice should be addressed to. Start with the distinction the whole system rests on.

Addressing is not hiding

Nothing on this page hides anything from anyone. Staff with the right permissions can always look anything up. What all of it changes is who a notice is addressed to, which affects what rises to the top of a person's list and what carries their name on it.

The product says it this way on screen: "An area records who oversees what. Staff with the right permissions can always look anything up, so an area neither hides anything from anyone nor grants anyone access."

So this is not a privacy control. Privacy is what roles and permissions do. See What each permission controls.

Ministry areas

An area is a named group of teams and groups with a set of overseers. Areas nest, so Kids can sit inside Operations, and an Operations overseer counts as an overseer of anything in Kids without being listed on the Kids team.

Go to Settings → Ministry areas. If your church has no areas yet, the page opens on a draft Scout has already filled in, behind a note reading "This is a draft from what Scout can see: who leads which teams, and who schedules people onto them. Nothing is saved yet. Fix anything that's wrong, then save."

Scout builds that draft from three things it can observe: who holds a lead or co-lead slot on an active team, who leads an active group, and who has put at least two volunteers onto a team's roster in the last 90 days. It clusters anyone who shares a team or group into the same area and guesses a name from the words those teams share, so "Kids Check-in" and "Portrait Kids" become "Kids".

Each area card holds a name, an optional parent under Inside, its overseers, its teams, and its groups. Edit anything, add an area, remove one, then press Save this map.

A few rules the form enforces: a team or group can be in only one area, area names must be unique and the check ignores capitalization, and a parent has to be another area on the same map.

A church plant with four staff and no structured teams gets no draft and an empty state instead. That is the honest answer for a church with no structure to describe yet.

The care set

The care set is your church's standing answer to "who does care here?". It is church-wide rather than per-team, and it is the piece that bites straight away.

You do not create it from Settings. Scout asks in the dashboard queue, one question at a time, and only when a live situation would actually have gone to that person: "Should Dana Ruiz hear when someone may need care?"

Scout nominates from observed care work, meaning at least three followed-up or prayed touchpoints in the last 180 days. It never asks a nominee about themselves, and it stores a "no" as a decision so it stops asking.

Once one person is granted, care-shaped notices are addressed to the care set and to the owner. Every staff member outside that set stops being addressed by them. They can all still see everything — with one deliberate exception: a note ticked Keep with the care team is visible only to the care set, admins, and its author. Until a care set is confirmed, those notes fall back to pastors and admins, never to all staff. That is the only thing the care set hides; routing everywhere else stays ordering and attribution.

How a notice is routed

Two kinds, decided per situation rather than by you:

• Sphere-anchored, when it is about a team or a group: serving strain, serving feedback, team health, kids check-in, group drift, forms, workflow stalls.
• Care-shaped, when it is about a person's wellbeing: at risk, care, prayer, celebration, first-timer, circle-back.

The decision runs in this order. Giving and pastoral-note notices stop at staff, always. The owner is addressed by everything else. Care-shaped items go to the care set, or to all staff if there isn't one. Sphere-anchored items go to the confirmed lead, then to overseers up the area chain, then to all staff.

A sphere-anchored item only reaches the lead and overseer rungs when Scout knows which team or group it is about. Serving strain does, through the slot someone is next scheduled on. The rest of the sphere-anchored families do not yet, so they land on the last step whatever your map says.

That collapse to all staff is the shipped default for a new church, and it is the right answer for a small team indefinitely.

Names mean nothing here. A custom role called "Executive Pastor" routes nothing. Scout keys off structure that a human confirmed.

The prayer team and care captures

Prayer teams hear heavy things after services and rightly keep their phones closed during ministry time. If you mark a team as your prayer team (Settings → Who hears what → Teams with a job), that team's post-serve reflection carries one extra optional question: "Did anything come up that staff should know about?"

What a volunteer shares lands on the dashboard for your care set the same day, in a group called From the prayer team. The words are visible only to the care set and admins — the same audience as a note marked Keep with the care team. From the row, a staff member can add it to the right person's profile as a care-team note, or mark it handled when the person isn't in Scout. Naming the person is always staff's job, never the volunteer's.

The volunteer sees "Passed along to the care team" and nothing more — what staff do next never travels back down.

Giving and pastoral notes have no dial

They are capped at staff and there is no control for them on the settings page, not even a disabled one. An absent control is Scout saying the answer was never the church's to give.

Settings → Who hears what

This page is the record of what has been decided, described on screen as "Who at your church hears which of Scout's notices, and what's been decided so far."

It holds the posture rows, the list of decided lead and care answers with a flip button on each, the family dials, and the leader-lane switch.

Five families are dialable: serving feedback, serving strain, group drift, first-timer, and prayer. Each row offers three settings: staff only, Staff, and the team or group lead, and Staff, and the ministry area's overseers. Serving feedback has one extra control, off by default, that lets a confirmed lead read what a volunteer actually wrote rather than only Scout's summary of it.

Reading the page needs View Scout's insights & engagement. Changing a dial needs Edit church settings, and flipping a lead or care answer needs Create & edit serving teams.

What is no longer here: the unanswered questions and the gaps. Both moved to the dashboard queue, where the situation that prompted them is sitting right there. See Working your list on the dashboard.

The leader lane

Turn on Show leads their notices in churchHQ and a confirmed team lead sees a card on their churchHQ home screen: the volunteer's name, one warm sentence, and a volunteer-sized action.

It carries two situations today, a volunteer under strain and serving feedback, with the actions Give them a lighter week and Say hi on Sunday. It never quotes a dollar amount and never shows a status or a score.

Three things all have to be true for a lead to see anything: the church switch is on, that lead has been confirmed, and the serving dial still allows the family to travel to a lead.

Next

• Working your list on the dashboard
• How roles work