In the last blog, we talked about how to organize your church volunteer teams by answering a few basic questions.  Once you have those figured out and have created your teams, you are ready to schedule and manage them.  Here's how that is done in Churchteams.

A client/friend set up a call with me recently to talk about the best way to set up their groups for volunteer scheduling.  As we talked, I realized that it might be helpful to do a blog post to help church volunteers and staff consider how to set up volunteer teams to make scheduling as easy as possible.  

I often talk with church staff and pastors about the discipline of taking attendance and why it matters.  Neither,  "because we've always done it that way",  nor "we've never done it before" are persuasive arguments.  

A few weeks ago one of our clients was having an issue with a company that was purchased a couple of years ago by a private equity firm.  He contacted me to see if we might have an idea about what was going on.   When I emailed the company to learn more, I discovered that they were training new frontline support staff.  They had hired young people with a great heart who did not yet have the experience our client expected and needed.

So, we're talking about text to register a couple of weeks ago.  James throws out the idea of using texting to take worship attendance.  This is an age-old question that churches ask us about all the time.  We discuss it more, and Mark realizes it's something he can easily add.  A day later and it's done.

Anytime someone asks about a specific solution to a problem, we ask questions to better under the problem itself first.  This practice enables us to take a fresh look at a problem rather than simply comparing it to other solutions.   Calendars is a great example.  What are the problems that calendars exist to solve in churches?   Here are the three that I've come up with and how we've chosen to address them.  

In 2014, our friends at Leadership Network found that over 8,000 churches in the U.S. were multisite.  And, that was 3 years ago!  In a blog post last year, Portable Church points out that churches of all sizes are going multisite.  This isn't a fad, it's now a normal part of ministry.  In fact I go to a campus of a very large, multisite church ... and love it.   So, what must church software be able to do to serve this growing movement?   Here are six things I believe are essential.

I often tell people that support and innovation are two of our distinctives as a church management software company.  We released our new, innovative online giving and text to give upgrades a couple of months ago.  At the same time, as a result of great interaction with our clients, we also released some really handy upgrades.  You may have seen these already.

"Let us not give up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another, and all the more as you see the day approaching."  Hebrews 10:24-25

In my Membership Class, I show a slide that I've developed over the years to help church staff evaluate the nature of the software they need.  Each of these serve a different purpose and require a different architecture.  Just as the architecture of a grocery store, a restaurant and a doctor's office are different based on purpose, so the architecture of church software is different based on its primary purpose.   Here's how I break them down:

Most churches have data scattered among several software applications.   This came about because in the past twenty years innovative programmers have developed applications that helped churches in ways that their old ChMS couldn't.