The second paragraph of the U.S. Declaration of Independence begins, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Two truths we hold to be self-evident. 1) All people are created.
New releases! Seven guardrails to help you keep your data safe.
Over time data has a tendency to drift off the road and even crash. The application itself might be fine, but the data is a wreck. When this happens, those depending on it no longer trust it, and start looking for something new.
One popular solution is to put a sentry at the gate of the database. This person is responsible for all data entry, reports, and maintenance. This solution helps keep data safe, but it also creates a bottleneck on use of the data. Like an accident on a 4 lane highway narrowing traffic down to one lane, church staff end up looking for detours to get their work done. Pretty soon the staff has data in so many locations they find themselves once again lacking trust in the core data.
We've felt for a long time that the database itself could become a decentralized sentry. We built reminder emails (groups, volunteers, payments) to make sure data is consistently collected. We built scheduled reports to automate communication of information.
We've also started building guardrails designed to keep data from getting wrecked. In fact, we've released seven of these in the past couple of months. Here they are along with a few other new releases.
FREE E-book: Top 50 List of the Best Leadership Books of All Time for Pastors
Note: Churchteams partners with CLI to help church leaders develop effective systems for ministry.
Hi, I’m Nelson Searcy, Lead Pastor of The Journey Church and founder of Church Leader Insights. As a coach to more than 3,500 pastors and church leaders, I’m often asked:
What are the top books you’d recommend for me to grow as a leader?
What happened in church? Help us discover the best and worst of the last 2 years.
It is clear that something is different about church since 2019. I mentioned this related to our voice of the customer research in my last blog. But is this difference good or bad? And, how can technology help?
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.
7 reasons churches love our software. New: Roundtable on Reports.
If you ask around, I think you'll find that our clients love our software not just because of the technology, but also because our team cares about them. Here's an excerpt from an email I got just last week from a Media Arts and Tech staff person after James helped them set up check-in.
"My friend was 100% right. ChurchTeams has been fantastic as we have gotten set up. If you ever need an example person for a new church getting started please consider giving them my contact information. I would be happy to talk to anyone who has questions about what it is like to work with your software and your team."
What will your church look like post-Covid? Get ready at Church Systems Boot Camp
Back in January I announced that we were going to start a weekly Roundtable for clients to discuss topics of interest. The idea was to create a collaborative learning environment for clients and our staff. We admitted up front that it would be an experiment and that we would be learning as we go. I thought you might want an update.
We all know that trust is foundational to successful relationships. It is also foundational to a successful relationship with your database. If you don't trust the data, you don't trust what the data tells you. That's a problem.
"Great things in business are never done by one person; they're done by a team of people."
Steve Jobs
Last fall we automated the Academy training webinars that I had done almost every week for years. They are now available on-demand 24/7.
For most of us, a new year represents an opportunity to identify any potentially harmful habits that have crept into our life and purpose to do something about them. You know, habits like eating, exercising and daily time in the Word. The Bible calls them "little foxes that spoil the vineyard."
In the same way, an organization has a way of creeping toward sloppy software habits - many times for good reasons. For example, we have had one software to help us host videos and another one to manage marketing for many years. Early last year, we found a software that excels at automated webinars. We started using it to learn how to effectively automate our webinars. A few months ago, we realized we could do the same thing by combining features we already have with our video and marketing software. So, last week we built the required landing pages and went from 3 back to 2 software applications. (See the results by clicking the links on our Webinar page.) It felt like we lost 10 pounds.
For nearly every church, the second or third largest line item in their budget is related to facility operations. This includes the care, maintenance, energy consumption, capital reserves, etc. All of this can be lumped into the cost of facilities.
Tags: Church Management Software, Groups