Easter is for Church what the Super Bowl is for football.  Everything comes down to this.  All the creativity, caring, dreams and hard work boil down to this annual celebration of the resurrection of Jesus.  By his sacrifice alone, we are healed.  This message changed the world.  It changes people.  Lots of people.  People your church is called to love.   

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.

When you want to improve church communication, you have to take into consideration the ways in which people communicate today. While printing out a weekly church bulletin and having a guestbook to sign may reach your older parishioners, younger generations are more interested in social media, emails and text messaging. As you work towards increasing new parishioner retention, you have to start reaching out to newcomers through technological means. When you want to get people who visit your church interested in what you have to offer, text messaging is an essential way to make this happen.

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.

In part 1 of this post, I discussed two things not to do when choosing a church management system. In part two, I will discuss 5 things to do to make the very best CMS selection for your church.

Kindergarten was filled with lots of life lessons, and they weren’t overly complicated. I either learned these lessons either from the Kindergarten school of hard knocks, or from stories with morals. 

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.