Getting started with digital curriculum
Dan Iten avatar
Written by Dan Iten
Updated over a week ago

Ministry Grid is the place to access digital curriculum from Lifeway! With Ministry Grid, you can easily manage digital curriculum access for teachers, leaders, and parents to prepare and teach.

Start by subscribing to your curriculum. Subscribing is all done right from within Ministry Grid where you pick your ministry size and whether you’d prefer to subscribe to the Basic or Plus plan.

Once you subscribe, you’ll have immediate access to that specific curriculum. While you can subscribe to multiple brands/age levels, those will need separate subscriptions.

Now that you have subscribed and paired your curriculum with your church, it is time to send the right curriculum to all of your leaders. This is made possible by sharing (or distributing) Collections of curriculum to the right leaders. Each brand and age level of curriculum come with pre-built Collections that make it easy to send the right content to the right people.

Start by selecting the curriculum you are managing from the Curriculum selection page. You’ll immediately see all of the Collections that come with your curriculum. You can manage who has access to each Collection in two ways. First, you can grab the Easy Link for that Collection and send that via a text message, chat, email, or other means of communication. That Easy Link will automatically give your people instant access to their curriculum! You can also send Email invitations directly from Ministry Grid if that is easier for you. If a leader no longer needs access, you can also remove people from that collection from this same screen.

Once a leader clicks an Easy Link (or receives their email invitation) and logs into Ministry Grid, they will immediately see their curriculum on their Dashboard. This dashboard will always be up-to-date and it provides all the resources they need to teach or prepare for each week’s sessions. What’s even better is that once you share that Easy Link (or send out their email invitation), you are done! The Easy LInk only needs to be given out once, and those people will always have the most up-to-date curriculum! If you have leaders that need multiple Collections, that is as easy as sending those people their different Easy Links for each Collection (or sending them additional email invitations) and they will instantly have access to the multiple Collections they need.

Now let’s talk about scheduling your curriculum! As an admin, navigate to the Schedule tab of your Curriculum. From here, you can see the default suggested schedule Lifeway provides. This schedule also matches all of your people’s individual dashboards as you share Collections with those people. So your schedules always stay in sync! As a rule of thumb, with your active monthly subscription, you’ll always be able to access sessions 8 weeks in advance of their suggested date of use and sessions remain available until 4 weeks after their suggested date of use. Within that 13 week window of time, you can reschedule any session for any day of the week you’d like. Use the Reschedule button on the right-hand side of the page to do so. You can also decide to Unschedule any session. Unscheduling a session removes the date entirely and automatically adds a “Not Scheduled” label on that session, so that your teachers know they are not teaching that session. You can Reschedule or Unschedule sessions as often as you’d like. Any changes you make to the Schedule will automatically be reflected on the dashboards of all your teachers!

Additionally, as an admin, from the Schedule tab, you can download any individual piece of content from any Collection within the available sessions you have access to - should you need quick access to something. But keep in mind, if you’re looking to distribute or share one of these Collections to your leaders, use the previous instructions in order to share Collections with your leaders/parents! This makes it so much easier to give the right people the right curriculum, without having to manage individual files, folders, or other websites!

Finally - if you need to give other people in your church the same admin access as you, that’s no problem! You can add as many admins as you would like! Use the Organization menu at the top of the screen to enter the Organization Dashboard. From here, click Manage Roles. Adding someone as an Admin role will automatically give them access to the “Curriculum” tab at the top of the screen where they will have the same level of access you have to distribute, schedule, and manage their curriculum.

We hope you enjoy this new way of using Lifeway’s digital curriculum! This is the first release of what we hope to be many future releases as we work to make your job easier to manage and distribute curriculum to your leaders and parents! If you have any questions, feel free to chat us using the chat bubble below OR you can visit support.ministrygrid.com where we have additional support articles to assist you!

Looking for more help with how to use curriculum in Ministry Grid? Check out our additional support articles and FAQs.

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