Boyd Pelley

Boyd Pelley
Co-founder, Churchteams. From 1990 to 2008 served as discipleship, administrative and family pastor of churches in New Mexico, Nebraska and Texas. Married 30+ years, 2 married adult children.
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Recent Posts

Stewardship 201 - Improve your church stewardship development system with these 3 scheduled reports

Posted by Boyd Pelley on 7/2/24 2:30 PM

In mylast blog post I mentioned that most churches don't have a stewardship development system in place.  Some will have a philosophical reason for this.  For others it's a matter of priorities and resources. 

I have no idea how many articles, books, conferences, and capital development programs I've been around through three (okay, four) decades of ministry.  I do know that they have been extremely helpful to churches I've been a part of and so many churches that we have served through the years. 

Our role as a church management software is to help churches set up and automate the best practices for which they have received training.  Last week I showed you the three filters in our reports to help with first, second, and lapsed contributors.

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Tags: Giving

Stewardship 101 - 3 filters that help pastors recognize givers in their church

Posted by Boyd Pelley on 6/18/24 2:00 PM
Have you ever wondered why you do what you do?  If this verse is accurate (it is), then your actions are an overflow of what's in your heart. 
 
Jesus taught this idea from many angles.  One of them is that out of the overflow of your heart your mouth speaks (Matthew 6:45).
 
Another well known illustration is in Matthew 6:21, where he says,  " For where your treasure is, there your heart is also."
 
In this passage and many others, scripture is clear that giving is an indicator of what is important to a person.  If someone gives poorly to a church, their commitment to and motivation (heart) to participate is usually pretty limited.  If someone gives generously, their commitment and motivation (heart) is generally significant.
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Tags: Giving

New!  High volume discounts and group texts from your phone number

Posted by Boyd Pelley on 6/4/24 1:45 PM
The challenge of sending free text messages by email does not seem to be going away, so many of our clients are deciding to move all their texting over to Text-to-Church.   There are a lot of benefits to using a 10 digit phone number for all your texting.  Here are a couple.
 
First of all, texts come from a phone number rather than an email address.  Secondly, people can reply to the text to interact further with the church using all the other features of Text-to-Church.  These include online giving, prayer requests, chats, registrations, connection card, check-in, keywords, workflows, and the Member App. 
 
The downside is that there is an additional cost.  So, this past week we added two things to help handle that additional cost - high volume discounts and group texts from your phone.
 
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Tags: New Release

New!  Upgrades to help keep data clean and people informed

Posted by Boyd Pelley on 5/21/24 1:30 PM

I recently gave a talk to a group of community and business people on values.  I chose this topic because our values for service and innovation are so important to our company being what the Lord wants it to be.  Behind each one of the upgrades below is a commitment on the part of our team to listen to our clients, really hear their needs, and innovate solutions that serve them well.

Data clarity and confidence is a real problem for churches.  We've implemented lots of checks and balances through the years to help with this.  Upgrades 1-3 mentioned below are just the latest ones.

The last two focus more directly on people.  One on making payments due and recurring payments more visible in the App for things like camp and school tuition.  The other provides a bit more clarity for those responsible for creating volunteer schedules.

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Tags: New Release

New!  Why sending a text is the BEST way to install a Church App

Posted by Boyd Pelley on 5/14/24 1:30 PM
We released our Member App just over eight months ago and are encouraged by how many people are already using it!  As always, we have loved the feedback from real world usage and made many tweaks to make the App experience even more stellar.  
 
One of the things people really like has been the ability to simply text "Me" to access and install the App.  Our Text-to-Church technology that allows this is one of the advantages of using Churchteams.  We leveraged it in the App rollout as a way for staff, online givers, and volunteers to get the App.  So, we were asked if we could expand that approach so that everyone could use it to install the App. 
 
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Tags: New Release, Communication

5 best practices for using and analyzing registration form responses

Posted by Boyd Pelley on 5/3/24 2:28 PM

There are two parts to every event registration or survey form software.  The first part is the design of the form itself.  In Churchteams this includes:  member attributes, registration fields, member notes, payment, fund designation, embed code, hyperlink, text keyword, header, completion response, confirmation email, multiple registrants, and redirect links.  I have written a lot about the abilities and upgrades of these features in previous blogs.

However, it occurred to me recently that I have never written a blog dedicated to the second part of registrations and forms software which is the spreadsheet that houses the results.  In Google Forms this is the responses page.  That data can also be exported into Google Sheets or Excel.  

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Tags: Registration

Three reasons cultivating values is worth the hard work

Posted by Boyd Pelley on 4/30/24 2:00 PM

Values-building in an organization is hard work.  I'm not talking about the work of writing something down for a business plan.  Nor the work of an executive team on a retreat wrestling over what is most important.  The result of this kind of work is a set of aspirational values.  These are just seeds.  

I'm talking about the hard work of cultivating, planting, watering, fertilizing, weeding, and protecting these seeds.  There's no shortcut for this work.  It takes time for values to put down roots, sprout, mature, and bear fruit.

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Tags: Best Practices

5 categories of registration features to help churches connect families to events

Posted by Boyd Pelley on 4/16/24 1:45 PM

Just this morning I was talking with a friend who is incredibly busy with end of the school year activities for his kids.  It's a great time of the year to celebrate, but it's also a season for church staff and families to start planning for summer activities. 

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Tags: Registration

New!  The best way to collect attendance from all your worship services

Posted by Boyd Pelley on 4/9/24 2:00 PM

A few months ago, I wrote an article on how to use All Check to capture worship attendance.  Having everyone in the family check in to everything at once including worship is really helpful.  That article answers the questions: why take individual attendance, how to do it, and how to motivate people to respond.  Check it out if you're interested.

Another one of our creative churches uses their digital connection card to take individual worship attendance for their multiple services.  On their connection card they have a "Service I'm attending" dropdown question with all their services listed including online.

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Tags: New Release, Reports

How to keep your staff aligned and your data clean. Church missions software.

Posted by Boyd Pelley on 4/2/24 1:45 PM

Now that Easter is over, pastors and church staff are turning their attention to planning and preparing for summer events.  In fact, a good friend, an elder at his church, recently asked me about using Churchteams for managing their church's mission trips. 

There are software solutions built specifically to solve this problem for churches.  But, he has been around the software world for decades and knew it would be better to use Churchteams if possible than to purchase another software.  The cost of another software is a factor, but the bigger issues are staff and data alignment.

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Tags: Church Management Software, Best Practices

How to simplify your church structure to be more clean and effective

Posted by Boyd Pelley on 3/26/24 1:30 PM
Have you ever walked through a church that has gone through several building programs over the decades?  Architects are brilliant at tying the different eras together, but the astute observer and especially the maintenance workers see the different stages.  There are differences in plumbing, electrical, ceiling heights, hallway widths, and much more.  Building materials and paint can only do so much.
 
The exact same thing happens with ministry structure over time.  You can see it in the budget, on the website, and in the bulletin.  Certain ministries have been around for decades and are organized around language like classes, committees, and programs.  Others reflect more contemporary language like groups, teams, and events.  
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Tags: Church Management Software

New! Check out these four improvements to our communication solutions

Posted by Boyd Pelley on 3/19/24 2:30 PM

There are many things that make Churchteams unique in the church management software space.  One is our choice to build out all the data related parts of our communication tools.  Text-to-Church and NED (email editor) are best-in-class level texting and email solutions that work hand-in-glove with our form, registration, notes, workflow, and process tracking features.

The HUGE advantage of building out all the features ourselves is that when a customer has a problem, or an idea; we have the ability to fix or upgrade it.  This agility helps us improve the customer experience as we improve the software.

Here are the release notes for four recent examples of how we've done exactly that.  

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Tags: New Release

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