Does your nursery or preschool ministry do monthly promotions based on the child's age? Do you want to stop manually selecting who to move, manually selecting the new groups, and manually promoting to the new group every month? Want to set it and forget it? Then use our automated daily Promotion routine to automatically promote from one Group to another based on age. For example, when a 2 year old (currently in the 2 year old green Group) turns 3, he is moved to the 3 year old purple Group. It is not recommended that you use this process for Groups that promote on an annual basis such as grade-based Groups. But don't worry, we have an automated solution for that, too ;)

Setup

To use the daily Promotion routine, open each applicable Group record and set the following values. Once this is complete and the routine is running on the server, individuals are moved daily and automatically:

• Group Type: Any
• Promote to Group: Select the Group to which kids in this Group should be moved when they age-out of the Group
• Age in Months to Promote: Set an integer value for the age of a group member in months when the routine should move the child to the group indicated by the Promote to Group field
• Promote Weekly: Yes (Note: although the field says "weekly," the routine runs daily)
• Promotion Date: must be left NULL

For example:

• Current Group Name: 2 year olds.
• Promote to Group: 3 year olds.
• Age in Months to Promote: 36 months.

Making Exceptions and Troubleshooting

You can make exceptions for certain Participants one by one or by Group Role Type. You can also determine if the Group Participant records are updated or created. See Promotions Routine for details.

Because the automatic promotions are based on a Participant's age in months, it might be helpful to actually know their age in months. To see the age in months, create a view of your children on the Contacts page and include the following in the "view" clause via the SQL view on the birthdate from the Contacts page. 

DateDiff(day,Date_of_Birth,getDate())/(365.25/12) AS Age_In_Months

Age to Grade Transition

At some point, you'll want to transition your age-based promotion groups to grade-based promotions groups.

• Manually: Use the Age Group Part. By Age view on the Group Participants page to select the kids who have aged-out of one Group. Then use the Assign tool to move them to the next Group (for example, Kindergarten).
• Automatically: Set the last age-based Group up to promote to a grade-based Group on a defined date. See Promoting School Aged Kids.

See Also: Routines, Promotion Routine, Promoting School Aged Kids