One of our advantages in the church management market is our agile culture.  There is just one degree of separation between clients and our development team.  As soon as a need or even a suggestion is vetted by a support team member, it is shared with development. 

Development keeps a running evaluation of these suggestions.  Some are as simple as a software edit and are immediately addressed.  They don't even make it to the list.  Others need affirmation, thought and evaluation.  As they come up again and are mulled over, they make their way to the investment of a few hours or days.  Others are much more involved and may take months or years to rise to the level of investment of weeks or even months of coding.  This set of releases fit into the first two categories.

Many ministry events and mission trips have been cancelled this summer due to Covid 19 and social distancing.  But as churches begin to re-open for worship, they are doing so with a renewed passion for their calling to make disciples of all nations.  

We have an incredible team.  For a number of months now, in addition to all the Covid 19 upgrades we've done, we've been working on upgrading our Navigation Bar buttons to make them more user-friendly.

If you are a long-time Churchteams user, you know what the software does, so you will be able to very quickly re-route from older paths to these new ones that we hope are more direct and more intuitive especially for new users.

If it weren't for Covid 19, our staff and many of you would be looking forward to being together in North Fort Worth next week.  Barbecue and Tex-Mex were on the menu along with 2 days of fellowship and learning.  

Author Note: (September, 2023)  Since this was originally written  in May, 2020 we continued to monitor how churches and people actually use both Texting and Apps. 

We became convinced that it really isn't one or the other.  It's about providing options for people to use based on their preferences. 

In August, 2023 we released our Member App (click here) after much research and deliberation.  It is state of the art and pairs very nicely with Text-to-Church.  The combined power of both of these tools to serve church members has became an important Churchteams distinctive.  

Apps are an important part of product offerings for some Church Management  Systems. They are the primary delivery system for other church related online services like payment processing, content delivery, and communication. 

1. Check Scanning & Image Archive.
2. Automated Check-in Printer Start Schedule.  
3. Office number for Text-to-Church.
4. Email lists upgrade.  Last week's blog.

Think about it.  Whenever you sign up for anything online, you are REQUIRED to provide an email address.  Often it becomes your username.  Email is as important to your Internet identity as your address is to your geographic identity. 

And email is an important part of church communication. The challenge is to effectively target the people with whom you want to communicate.  Our report filters allow you to select people based on group involvement (or not), any member attribute and even giving habits.  

These weeks of churches not being able to physically meet due to Covid 19 are requiring us to review and upgrade our thoughts about communication.  It seems like a perfect time to start a series I've been thinking about on email and email marketing.

I started this series more than a month ago but got sidestracked on topics related to the Covid 19 crisis.  The pandemic has only ramped up.  But, for a moment, let's refocus on how we help a church measure how well they are multiplying disciples.

Jesus didn't mentor his disciples just to make them better men.  His goal was for them to mentor other people who would do the same thing.  Paul was super clear on this multiplication model of mentoring in 2 Timothy 2:2.

We who are captivated by the privilege and challenge of this calling are part of a growing movement of churches owning the multiplication vision.  Our experience has shown us that consistency and conversations are two powerfully helpful measures of multiplication.

All of us miss being together on Sundays but we're finding new paths to stay connected.  Like the creative ways many of you are using Text-to-Church to help.

One recent idea was to use All Check to have people text to let us know they were watching the live-stream or video.  It also gives them an opportunity to respond, give and stay informed.  Like a church bulletin, but on steroids.

But there was a problem.  The system required starting up a label printer in order to use Check-in.  So, we changed development priorities last week and are excited to release an upgrade to Check-in that allows you to create an automatic check-in start up schedule without having to start a label printer.