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The Key Dates module is your at-a-glance view of upcoming birthdays and wedding anniversaries in your church. It’s a simple way for pastoral and staff teams to keep on top of who to send a card to, mention in a service, or drop a message — and it’s the home for the automated celebration emails Church Admin can send on your behalf.
Finding the page
Open the Key dates tab. The overview screen shows two tables: birthdays coming up in the next 31 days, and wedding anniversaries coming up in the next 31 days. Both are ordered by date, soonest first, so today’s and this week’s celebrations sit at the top.
What the overview shows
For each person or couple you’ll see their name, the date, their age or number of years (in the admin view), and their email and mobile number so you can reach them quickly. Mobile numbers are tap-to-call, which is handy on a phone.
Anniversaries are shown per household, against the heads of the household. Where a couple share a surname they’re listed together (for example “John & Jane Smith”); where they have different surnames, both full names are shown.
Admin view vs the public list
Inside the admin area, the overview deliberately shows everyone — including people who’ve chosen not to appear publicly in the address list. This is so your staff team don’t accidentally miss someone’s birthday just because that person keeps a low profile publicly.
When you display birthdays or anniversaries on your public website using the shortcodes, the opposite applies: only people who have opted to be shown, and who have the necessary data-protection consent recorded, are included. So the admin list is complete, while the public list respects each person’s privacy choices.
Showing key dates on your website
You can display upcoming birthdays or anniversaries on the front end of your site with shortcodes, and control who’s included and how far ahead to look — by member type, people type, number of days, and whether to show ages, emails and phone numbers. Use the Shortcode generator to build the exact shortcode you need.
Automated celebration emails
The real power of Key Dates is automation. From the sub-pages you can set up emails that send themselves:
- A Happy Birthday email sent to each person on their birthday, and a Happy Anniversary email to each couple on their anniversary.
- A daily digest emailed to a chosen person or team, listing that day’s birthdays, anniversaries, or both — so someone always knows who to celebrate.
- A Send test email option so you can check everything looks right before it goes live.
See the individual sub-pages below to set each of these up.