A church executes its vision by developing a strategy. But, whether or not that strategy succeeds is determined by how well a church uses its software. 

Tags: Church Management Software, Best Practices

This is my last blog post for the year and may be a little geeky, but I'm going to share it with you anyway. I've always loved this poem and have customized it before for Christmases past. But, this one is for Christmas present. Receive it not just from me, but from our team as well. This is why we do what we do.  

Tags: Best Practices

Most churches measure worship attendance.  They also have some sort of metric for small group attendance.  Comparing one to the other demonstrates how effective they are at moving people from being anonymous to being known - from rows to circles. 

Tags: Best Practices

It is no secret that the best way to collect data on Sunday morning is through children's check-in.  The reasons are obvious:

Tags: Best Practices, Automation

The first step in setting up a workflow is to map it.  That is to set a goal or define what success looks like.  I use the example of success for a first time guest workflow is for the person or family to show up a second time. Then, the goal of the second time guest workflow is for them to attend a new members class. From there the goal is to help them respond to Christ in whatever way is best for them ultimately getting them involved in community and ministry.

Tags: Best Practices, Automation

In the past several weeks I’ve been working with an Executive Admin of a large church to reorganize their data structure for effective assimilation.  You could tell by the different fragments of data that several different approaches to assimilation had been implemented through the years. Usually this happens when different church staff use different fields to track the same information.  Or sometimes there are different perceptions of what the assimilation process actually is.

Tags: Best Practices, Automation

From the beginning of the Churchteams vision, there was a component I called Giftfinder that I dreamed of building into the software.  We built Groupfinder to help people connect with small groups. And Growthfinder as a spiritual growth assessment designed to help pastors, staff and group leaders measure and track spiritual growth.  Here's a Best Practices Blog post on using Growthfinder. 

Tags: Groups, Volunteers, Best Practices

Tags: Registration, Best Practices

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. 

Tags: Membership, Best Practices

Thank you to Bruce Droogsma from Wayzata Free Church in Plymouth, MN for coming to the User's Gathering and writitng this blog summary for his group.  

Tags: Best Practices

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.

Tags: Best Practices

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." 

Tags: Groups, Best Practices