Helping people connect to groups has been a core feature in Churchteams since the beginning.  We started using the term Groupfinder for this feature back in 2001.  You customize the search options to fit your church and the questions you would ask to help someone find a group.  Then categorize the groups accordingly and people looking for groups can find a match themselves. This removes staff from being the bottleneck for connection, but notifies staff when connections are made to keep them in the loop.

Many churches that receive hundreds of checks every week use check readers and scanners to help with data entry. We recently did some research on these systems and built then released what we believe is a much more streamlined approach. Here is what we learned and our application.

The team has been busy the past few months adding a number of items that you may have already seen and not realized.  For power users, take a moment to review these 12 items, all of which sharpen your Churchteams experience.  

My guess is that most of you will especially appreciate the new pinned attributes.  Third on this list.

 As usual, we've been busy with upgrades.  Here are the highlights from the past couple of months.  You likely have already seen many of these, but if not, these could really be helpful time-savers for you.

We've offered Event Registration and Volunteer Scheduling for years. But they have been far less obvious than most of our features and we wanted to elevate their visibility.  Late last week we released an upgrade to the Group Info Page to make what was less visible more visible and add a new RSVP feature.

Text-TO-Church ^TM is a new User Interface concept.  It combines texting ideas that have been the domain of specialty platforms, with the functionality of a full church management system.  For over a decade people have been able to send a text to donate to an online giving platform.  In recent years applications were developed to text to register for something like an event or a content drip.  With Text-TO-Church, all the functionality of your church database is now just a text away.  Here's the list of current features that fit under the Text-TO-Church concept.  Click the link for a more complete explanation of each one.  The Text-To-Church Innovation post was written to help you actually experience everything except Text-to-ME which wasn't done at that time.

I have done several blog posts the past 4 months related to texting.  The response has been incredible.  We are excited to see this innovation engage guests, regular attenders, members  and staff in a new, extremely relevant way.  The more we have worked with it, the more we realize the potential of texting as a tool for simple and user-specific interface with your Churchteams database. 

 Support is a huge value for Churchteams.  We love our clients and love interacting with you.  From these interactions we learn what makes using the software more difficult than it needs to be and gain fresh ideas for improvement. Mark and Donna not only are building the exciting future of Churchteams features, but they also work tirelessly to upload data and make your best ideas a reality.  This makes Churchteams a better tool for everyone.  Here is a list of touch-upgrades to the software since early June.

*Okay, yes, I did make up the phrase "Text-TO-Church".

Receiving a text FROM a church is nothing new.  Lots of churches use text to send updates, news and reminders. This feature has been part of Churchteams for a number of years.