Getting Started with Shepherd

Welcome to Shepherd. This guide walks you through your first launch and the
handful of decisions that shape the rest of the app.

What Shepherd is

Shepherd is a pastoral-care companion for ministers. It tracks the people in
your congregation, the households they belong to, the events you plan, the
groups they join, and the prayer needs you carry on their behalf. Its
Dashboard is built to answer one question every morning: who needs me today?

Shepherd runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Your data syncs privately through
your own iCloud account — there is no Shepherd server holding congregational
information.

First launch — the onboarding flow

The first time you open Shepherd, you’ll walk through a short setup:

1. Ministry name. The name of your congregation, parish, or ministry.
   This appears in exported documents and across the app.
2. Your name and role. How Shepherd addresses you in the Dashboard
   greeting.
3. Terminology. Choose the words that fit your tradition — “member” vs.
   “parishioner”, “congregation” vs. “parish”, and so on. These flow through
   every screen.
4. Disengagement threshold. The number of days without contact before
   Shepherd starts surfacing a person as disengaging on the Dashboard.
   The default is 60 days; adjust to match your tradition’s rhythm.

You can revisit any of these later in Settings. Nothing you choose at
onboarding is locked in.

The five tabs

Once onboarding is complete, you land in the app proper. Shepherd is
organized into five tabs:

• Dashboard — your pastoral-care triage screen. In Crisis,
  Follow-ups Due, Disengaging, Upcoming Anniversaries, Continuing Care,
  Pressing Tasks, Upcoming Events, Prayer Reminders.
• People — every individual and household you serve. Toggle between a
  person-centric and a household-centric view at the top of the tab.
• Events — worship services, weddings, funerals, small-group meetings,
  mission trips, retreats, everything on your ministry calendar.
• Groups — small groups, Sunday school classes, committees, ministry
  teams. First-class citizens in Shepherd.
• Prayer — the prayer requests you are carrying, with a distraction-free
  Carousel mode for use in your own prayer time.

On Mac and iPad the same tabs appear as a sidebar.

Adding your first people

Before the Dashboard becomes useful, Shepherd needs to know who it is
caring for. You have four routes in:

• Add one at a time. People tab → + → fill in as much or as little
  as you like. Only a name is required.
• Import a roster from CSV. Settings → Import Roster. Shepherd reads a
  spreadsheet of names, contact info, and pastoral fields. See the
  Importing and Exporting Data article for the column format.
• Import contacts (vCard). Settings → Import Contacts. Shepherd can
  pull from a vCard file and will offer to cluster same-surname,
  same-address contacts into a household.
• Add as you go. Every list that touches a person has a + button to
  create one inline.

What to do next

• Read Managing People and Households to understand Shepherd’s identity
  model.
• Read Understanding the Dashboard once you have a few dozen people
  entered — that’s when the triage view earns its keep.
• Adjust Settings and Customization to match your tradition’s vocabulary
  and cadence.

Privacy and data

Shepherd stores pastoral data in your personal iCloud container. It is not
visible to Shepherd’s author, Apple, or any third party. Confidential
visit notes are flagged in the app and hidden behind a tap; a future
release will add on-device encryption for these fields. Treat Shepherd
the way you would treat any other device holding congregational
records — with reasonable care and a device passcode.