In my Membership Class, I show a slide that I've developed over the years to help church staff evaluate the nature of the software they need.  Each of these serve a different purpose and require a different architecture.  Just as the architecture of a grocery store, a restaurant and a doctor's office are different based on purpose, so the architecture of church software is different based on its primary purpose.   Here's how I break them down:

Most churches have data scattered among several software applications.   This came about because in the past twenty years innovative programmers have developed applications that helped churches in ways that their old ChMS couldn't.

This blog post is for our newest customers.  You are done with the search process, opted to continue your trial, and filled out our follow up form to help us help you get going with excellence.  Here are the next steps I would do.  Let's go!

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:

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.

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.