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.

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.  

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.  

Let's welcome our new friends from Exponential last week.  Some of you joined James and me Wednesday for our lunch discussion on the topic of "How to measure the immeasurable parts of discipleship." 

I love this topic and it was amazing do it with James.  We not only shared, but also asked questions and listened to the experience of others.  I have reflected on all of it quite a bit since then, and thought it might be worth it to capture and share some of those thoughts.  So, here are five ideas on how to improve what you know about discipleship progress in your church.

There's a chapter in the book, Perspectives on the World Christian Movement entitled, "The Two Structures of God's Redemptive Mission."  In it Ralph Winter makes the Biblical and historical case for the importance of fraternal church associations.  He refers to the church as the modality structure and these associations as the sodality structures God uses to accomplish His redemptive purposes. 

There's no doubt that what we call network and missional non-profits have been part of God's plan since the book of Acts.  This doesn't take away from the church.  It actually adds to it.  It extends and empowers it.  That's why I love that our software is being used by so many of these organizations.