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.

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.