Keeping Track: The Importance of Church Management Software
Upon graduating from seminary three years ago, one of the last things on my mind was how to track attendance and follow-up on first-time guests. Armed with fresh theology and some church growth principles, I threw myself into preaching well and implementing small groups. And though those things have been a huge blessing, I realized that much more was necessary.
I needed to begin keeping good track of who was coming and going and why. So how do you do it? How you do keep track and help to assimilate the people that come to your church event? There are a number of reasons why you’d want to, and a number of ways to do it.
Why you should:
- To evaluate the effectiveness of your programming: If you don’t know how many come, you have no idea if you’re reaching your goals. Don’t have any goals? Ask Jesus to help you with that one.
- To know who needs follow up: If you’re not keeping track, you’re just looking at an amorphous mob of people that are all the same and have the same needs. The reality is never quite like that.
How you might:
- Paper: You might have a trusty notebook where you enter the attendance and information of people. If you have nothing else, and you don’t have a computer, you can rock it old school-style like this.
- Computer spreadsheet: If you have a computer, you might be tempted to use Excel or another spreadsheet to enter the information of your people. Though you may be able to accurately log their information, you’re putting the information at risk. I heard of one church that used this method successfully with up to 700 members. One day their spreadsheet became corrupted, and they lost all their information. The weeping and gnashing of teeth began on that day for them.
- Web-based application: I believe that this is the best option for a few reasons. For one, multiple people can add and edit information at the same time from any computer with web access. Two, you don’t have to worry about your computer or notebook being destroyed. If your computer happens to blow up, you still have the information since it’s stored “online.”
Who you might use:
There are probably about a dozen church management systems out there including Fellowship One, Arena (Shelby), Connection Power, ACS, and others. After considerable research, I ended up narrowing my options down to Fellowship One and Connection Power. Fellowship One is used by the likes of The Journey Church, Lakewood Church, and Fellowship Church. In other words, it’s used by many of the “major league” churches out there. It also includes major league pricing. It’s very expensive. Their cost is based upon average weekly attendance, like most similar systems, but they have quite an expensive setup fee. The pricing alone narrowed down my option to Connection Power.
Though it’s not perfect, I like Connection Power for a variety of reasons:
- It has a built in assimilation system for followup. If you don’t already have a system for followup, this will be important to you. It’s a followup system based upon calling people that attend for the first time. When people attend, they are “assigned” a care-caller that gives them a welcome call and answers any questions they might have. I tried this out, but this system didn’t work out too well for us. We instead went with a followup system based upon the book Fusion.
- Price: It’s considerably less expensive than most out there, while retaining the majority of the features and value. For a church of our size (about 100), you will pay about $600 per year for the features that we use.
- You can use it to schedule your volunteers. When you schedule a volunteer for an event, it will email them with all the pertinent information, including a link they can use to confirm or decline the invitation. You can also set it up to send you a text message when you have been assigned a volunteer assignment.
I don’t think any of these systems are perfect, but for the moment we’re enjoying using Connection Power.
What about you? What are you using for these purposes?
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Good thoughts, Rodlie. I'm assuming that you still have someone manually entering attendance each week. What are the major-league churches doing in this regard? I've heard of some churches that have registration kiosks. Their members essentially check-in on their way into church. I thought this might be perceived negatively, but am told that it is generally well-received. Seems like I remember that the kiosks printed name tags for everyone, too.
Yes, we still enter it in manually. Of large churches that I've visited, I've seen them use the kiosk system, but mainly to register the kids. I haven't seen it in action with the adults. I know I have heard of the kiosks being used with adults for special events, though.
Hi. Quick Question. I read an article by you that said that you used “Connection Power” software along with the FUSION stuff by Nelson Searcy. We’ve just incorporated the FUSION assimilation stuff & we need web-based church management software. Do you still use that? Do you think this is good for a small but growing church (around 50 right now)?
Great question, Jim. I think Connection Power is a great resource for any church. There’s lots of advantages, at the moment for it. I know we’re not using connection power to its fullest use, but we use it to keep track if someone is a first, second time guest, regular attender, or member. We put any contact with the guest in the notes section.
And when you’re ready to start a children’s church program, it has the software built in to do that, for free. So you’d just have to spend about $100 for a good label printer and you’d be good to go. I’ll be writing a blog post on launching a children’s church in a couple days. Stay tuned!