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: participation to review, care, prayer, celebration, first-timer, circle-back. Participation to review includes Needs Attention and Limited participation, as well as people Scout has prioritized for review from other status tiers.

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.

Deciding on the team page

Each team's page carries a card called Feedback and who sees it. It holds the questions that used to live in Settings, next to the people they affect:

• Ask this team how serving went. On by default. The evening after they serve, each volunteer gets one question about how it went. If someone had a hard time, staff find out that night. Turn it off, and Scout doesn't ask or collect anything about this team.
• Add the care question. Off by default. When it's on, volunteers on this team can name someone who needs prayer or a check-in after they serve. Prayer teams are a natural fit, but any team can use it.
• What leads read when a volunteer writes about a hard serve. Choose The observation, which is one sentence from Scout like "Marked their last serve difficult," or Their exact words. The observation is the default, because volunteers write more openly when their lead can't read the words. Changing this needs Edit church settings. Staff can always read what the volunteer wrote.

Each lead's row on the team page shows whether they get notices about the team, who decided, and when. If no one has decided yet, Scout asks on that lead's row. A lead who gets notices sees two kinds in the churchHQ app: a volunteer on the team had a hard serve, or a volunteer is serving too often.

Volunteers are told the rule they are writing under: the reflection form says "Only staff read what you write here," or names the leads who read it.

Care captures

When a team carries the care question, 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 control

They are capped at staff and there is no control for them anywhere, 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 read-only 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." Deciding happens on each team's page and in the dashboard queue; this is where you review the whole posture at once.

It holds the summary rows and the list of every decided lead and care answer, with who decided it. A team lead's answer links back to the team page, where it changes. Group and care answers can still be flipped here, because they have no page of their own yet.

One control remains: the Connections team picker, which says which team receives first-timer notices. Changing it needs Edit church settings. Reading the page needs View Scout's insights & engagement, and flipping a group or care answer needs Create & edit serving teams.

What is no longer here: the unanswered questions and the gaps moved to the dashboard queue, and the per-team feedback controls moved to each team's page. See Working your list on the dashboard.

The leader lane

When a staff member confirms a team's first lead, that lead starts seeing a card on their churchHQ home screen: the volunteer's name, one warm sentence, and a volunteer-sized action. There is no separate switch — saying yes to a lead is the decision, and the question says so before you answer it.

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.

Two things have to be true for a lead to see anything: that lead has been confirmed by name, and their team still lists them as a lead. Someone who steps down stops hearing on their own, with nobody revoking anything.

Next

• Working your list on the dashboard
• How roles work