Our pastoral staff does a fantastic job of presenting the core values of our church each year in a sermon series.  Worship.  Connect.  Serve.  Invest.  We have them posted on our website.  We have signage for the foyer.  We even go into deep detail during the membership class.  However, we found that when it came to actually putting these core values into practice, some folks were at a loss as to where to start.

1. Uniform branding.  Consistency in the look and feel of all emails that officially go out from the church helps build familiarity and confidence in church communication.
2. Staff time savings.  Staff save time by creating templates for regularly used emails like follow up from connection cards. These can be set up to contain all the responses needed so that staff just edit out unneeded information.

If you've never thought about developing a communication strategy, here's a blog post from Orange that might be a good launching point.

Those of us who deal with database maintenance at all share the headache of discovering and merging duplicates.  The best practice for keeping a clean database in our church software is to schedule a monthly event or task to run merge reports for members and families.  We've added and detailed several options for both types of merge reports under the Members button then click Merge.  This is your foundational task for maintaining your database. 

The best place to connect with parents on Sunday morning is when they check-in their kids.  This is just as true for your members and regular attenders as it is for your guests.  You may already be using that time to start the follow-up process.  If not, see section D in the check-in view.  But, why not use the same opportunity to capture attendance for everything everyone in the family is attending or serving in that morning?  

How well are your emails really being received?  We've been on a learning curve in this area the past few years.  As many of you know we released significant upgrades to our email system back in 2016.  Here's the blog post - New Release: Built-in Email Marketing.  It contains the details. But since it came up at our User's Gathering a couple of weeks ago, here are a few best practices that some of our clients are using to increase the impact of their email communication.

We had such a great time gathering last week with staff and friends from around the country.  It was our first time to do something like this and we learned much that I hope to share with you in the next few blogs.  We broke into smaller groups and did work around tables.  One of the first questions people interacted over was, "What delights you about Churchteams." 

Helping people connect to groups has been a core feature in Churchteams since the beginning.  We started using the term Groupfinder for this feature back in 2001.  You customize the search options to fit your church and the questions you would ask to help someone find a group.  Then categorize the groups accordingly and people looking for groups can find a match themselves. This removes staff from being the bottleneck for connection, but notifies staff when connections are made to keep them in the loop.

Many churches that receive hundreds of checks every week use check readers and scanners to help with data entry. We recently did some research on these systems and built then released what we believe is a much more streamlined approach. Here is what we learned and our application.

He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.  Malachi 4:6

The highlight of the youth ministry year is often that week everyone gets on a bus to go sleep in a cabin, play lots of games, and learn more about what it means to follow Jesus as a teenager. Lives are changed forever at youth camp.