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!
We use at our church IconCMO which tracks attendance not only for worship but also small groups. It is also able to do volunteer coordination and send out reminders to those volunteers. An example of their pricing. Under 100 households for one year is 304.00/year. 101-250 households is 364.00/year. It is very affordable and has a great feature set that can go head to head with the big league players and a fraction of the cost. This cost also includes the contribution and fund accounting module. Some of the big league players do not have fund accounting which is essential to a church for their accounting books and no Quickbooks does not cut it. That is an entirely different post.
Thanks Jay for the jumping in.
I still have not made a decision on software yet. I pastor a smaller church plant, and use Outlook for our contacts & excel for attendance. I know it’s not the best thing to do – but signing up for ConnectionPower is like $50 per month (for the 2 modules that I think we’d need). IconCMO is half that price, but if I recall correctly, it seemed like there was a larger learning curve (I would be utilizing volunteers, so the more intuitive, the better).
I’m hesitant to make the switch because of the price (right now, it’s free) and when we change, we’ll be committing for the long haul.
I think we’ll be more effective with software, so one day I’d like to make the switch. I only hope that I chose one that I won’t regret.
Anyone else want to chime in? I’d appreciate hearing your thought.
Yes IconCMO is cheaper than the others as illustrated. And the ConnectionPower being at 50.00/month for just the 2 modules you need. IconCMO includes more than 2 modules at half that cost. Many software companies collect their money up front and after the church finds out that it is not what they want they don’t want to move away from it because of the sunk cost, which is sad. My only wisdom here is to read up on selecting software in general because this is not an effective reason to not move on. Many organization, not just churches, fail to recognize they made a mistake and stick it out for another 10 years just because they sunk 5K into a system.
The issue with learning the system is mitigated by free training webinars that the company puts on every month. I know of no other company that does this for their product. Most will charge 50.00/hr to 200.00/hr bleeding the church’s budget after putting a big sunk cost into getting it. Any system is going to require training just because Church Management is a complex set of variables and interfaces that people must learn.
It is hard to give up free anything, however when it comes time to pick one that cost money it may be best to ask questions about training. The modules that you are talking about appear to be more about attendance. The IconCMO system in reference to attendance, groups, and special gifts all use the same interface. In other words the learning curve is reduced because if you understand one module you can apply it to the others. The accounting module also uses similar interfaces and processes everything in the order the buttons are laid out on the screen. Hope this helps.
Is this a fortune 500 company, a large local business or church website? I couldn’t really tell the difference.
This is a church database software that helps you keep track of lots of information, including basic stuff like name, addresses, and phone numbers. You don’t agree with knowing that info?