A few years ago, a fortune 100 executive, Russ Mcguire, wrote an article for Christian Computing Magazine identifying four technological revolutions in the past 40 years. Here are his four revolutions:

Yesterday, I did a workshop at the Southwest Small Groups conference in Las Vegas that my friend, Mark Howell, is hosting.  The title of my workshop was Small Group Intelligence Software.  I thought I would take a couple of weeks to share some of that content.  Today, I'd like to consider the role of software in ministry.  This diagram illustrates it well.

A few years ago, we heard about and met a company that had introduced giving by text overseas and were bringing it to the United States.  At first, I was skeptical.  We've been doing this long enough to know that not every new thing is an improvement.  Adoption is more important in the long run than innovation.   We decided to watch, listen and learn.  We became convinced in late 2015 and began building our own, integrated, version of text-to-give in mid and late 2016.  Last week we rolled it out.  Here is how we became convinced.

For years I've done webinars to show prospects and clients together how to get the most out of the different features of the software.  At first, this was fine because the feature set was small groups and then membership.  As we added features, I added webinars (virtual classes) for contributions, check-in, volunteers & events, and setup & help.  For about a year I've had a feeling that we could do better.  With input from clients and staff, we just changed our learning process to three stages:  Get Acquainted, Get Going, and Get Trained.

Last week I wrote about the reasons personal support matters to us.  I mentioned that it helps us with research and allows us to live out the Golden Rule to "do unto others as you would want them to do to you". This week's blog details how we've lived these principles out the past few months. Bullet points by area of tweaks and upgrades the past several months.  Almost all because of client needs and ideas.

Today's church management software is expected to be easy for the user to figure out and use. Unfortunately, too many churches are still using systems that don't fit this criteria. In both cases the preferred method of support is video, FAQ, or paying for a support contract. Here are three reasons we are convinced personal support matters and should be a priority rather than a last resort.

 In the previous blog, we talked about what the successful use of church software  looks like.  But, once you've defined success, how do you measure it?  

Peter Drucker, the business management sage, taught us that you can't improve what you can't measure. This simply means that if you want to make something better, you must define what better looks like and then develop a way to measure it.  So, what does effectiveness look like in using a church management system? Here are some of the factors.

This was my 18th new year as the co-founder of a company working on new software.  As I was contemplating 2016 and anticipating 2017 this week, I thought about the lifecycle of software and, much like life, how it goes through several stages.