This morning we released an upgrade to automate important database changes that need to happen when someone is marked as deceased. Usually this comes up because a surviving family member has received a letter, an email, a giving statement or some other communication that includes their deceased loved one's name or other information.
When someone dies, make these six changes to your church database. This new release helps.
Tags: New Release, Best Practices
How to displace the stress church staff feel with renewed joy.
For many churches the most disruptive way that life happened over the past two years has been the stress level of staff.
Here is a survey response from one church:Our senior pastor resigned after 25 years, we are now searching for a new senior pastor. Our children's minister also resigned. Both in 2021.
Tags: Best Practices
3 ways to use church management software to reclaim your outward focus.
Some churches thrived the last couple of years in the areas of evangelism and missions by serving their community as testing / vaccination sites or food distribution centers. These raised their level of visibility.
But, the more common experience has been like this one from our January survey.
Tags: Best Practices
What is Adaptive Pastoring and how can digital technology help?
It seems like life's challenges never slow down, much less stop. We turn on the news every day to learn of the latest shooting, natural disaster, economic challenge, social unrest, health guideline, political argument, and now a war.
This sense of constant change weighs heavily on the shoulders of church leaders. How should we respond in light of all this, and what technology tools can help?
This comment from our survey a couple of months ago is insightful.
Tags: Best Practices
Three tools to help you love the cautious people in your church.
How is your church different now than in 2019?
This was the question I asked in my blog on January 11. It linked to a survey that many of you responded to.
As I reviewed and organized what I learned from this survey, I came up with "Seven ways life happened to church in the past three years."
So far, I've written blogs on three of these. This is the fourth. The insight is that as a result of the pandemic, we now have a more Cautious Congregation.
Church staff are seeing this in the form of less responsiveness to connection cards; more quickly to say no when asked to volunteer; less engaging in community; and, for many people, a slow return to church life.
These insights come from personal conversations as well as survey responses like these:
Tags: Best Practices
How to see and engage visitors and people who have not come back.
One of the most interesting things I've heard from a lot of church leaders is that their Sunday numbers are almost back compared to pre-Covid, but the crowd is different. There are lots of new faces. And a lot of the old faces are missing.
Tags: Best Practices
How workflows help you care for new people and avoid assimilation stagnation.
Last week we focused on our new Text upgrades rollout, which, by the way, is a game-changer if you missed it. This week, I'm back to my Life Happened series talking about how technology can help the church navigate the change we've seen the last three years. The 7 topics for this series came out of the voice of the customer research we recently did to try to pinpoint what actually changed.
Tags: Best Practices, Automation
How All-Check helps you connect people across all channels of blended worship.
Blended worship in 2019 referred to the style of music in services. Should we offer contemporary, classic, country-western, or blended? This has been an issue for decades.
In 2022 blended worship, however, refers to the channels through which worship is offered. What combination of live worship, Facebook, Youtube, Vimeo, Churchstreaming.tv, or other streaming services should we use?
Tags: Best Practices
Seven ways life happened to church in the past three years.
Change through challenging times is an important part of what it means to walk with God. As the Serenity prayer instructs us, "hardship is the pathway to peace."
One of the reasons hardship leads to peace is that there's a significant part of that path where we're disoriented and uncertain about the terrain on which we're travelling. It's along this section of the road that faith is built, that is, peace with God. Covid 19 has been such a roadway for the church.
Tags: Best Practices
Two customer research insights and how we empower church leaders.
Happy new year to you and your church teams. May the Lord give you new insights for reaching people in the almost post-pandemic world of 2022.
As part of our planning for the future, we recently contracted a Voice of the Customer researcher to interview eight of our most active customers. There were lots of insights but two stood out to me that I'd like to address talk about in this blog post.
Why should you use lists to send email? An important reason and a cool report.
You guys, email is not dead! Sure, texting is emerging (we have you covered there) and social messaging and apps are vying for attention, but check out this stat in the Hubspot article, The Ultimate List of Email Marketing Stats for 2021.
Tags: Best Practices, Reports, Communication
Our New Look and Three Insights into the Importance Of Color
If you follow this blog, you know that last week we released an important change to our look and feel. The post focused on the ability to quickly look at a series of pinned attributes to have a sense of where someone is on your discipleship profile spectrum.
As you can see it gives a picture of their involvement with just a glance. And it's fully customizable to accommodate the attributes you define as discipleship measures. (Check out the Discipleship Signs series for more on that.)
Tags: New Release, Best Practices