By Tim Cool
If you’re involved with the administration, IT or some aspect of the support / business side of a church, you most likely have had some experience with what’s affectionately called “ChMS,” or church management software.
Before launching my own software company, I had no idea the number of providers, options, features and price points available in this space for church leaders. So, how do you choose?
How do you make the right choice?
Is it too confusing?
Do you throw your arms in the air or throw a dart at a list on your wall?
4 common selection approaches
As I’ve interviewed many administrators, IT directors, event coordinators and the like, it’s clear that most church leaders make their decisions in one of the following four ways:
1) Best-in-class vs. best-in-integration. Church leaders who use this process are looking for the best products —the best-in-class — regardless of whether it’s fully integrated with other software solutions that they need, use or desire. Conversely, those who reverse this equation are generally making the decision to sacrifice some features, services or tools to get a fully integrated solution.
2) Easy to use vs. feature-rich. To me, the choice seems pretty clear: I like easy. Several years ago, 37 Signals — the software developer of such SaaS products as Highrise, Basecamp and others — released an e-book, Getting Real. Its premise was to develop software that “under-featured” and “under-priced” the developer’s competitors. They wanted to produce software that was easy to use and graphical in nature. They don’t try to be “all things to all people.” Personally, I love their vision, and I actually use several of their products because of their ease of use.
In a related finding by ChMS provider FreshVine, church administrators were asked to identify the most important ChMS feature. Instead of offering a list of possible features, the provider asked an open-ended question: “What features would be most important if you could use a secure, web-based system for church management?” In response, nearly 75 percent of the church administrators cited ease of use.
3) The real cost of ownership. If a ChMS program is inexpensive, the proverbial good stewardship “card” is easy to default to. While I do believe this guiding principle is in church leaders’ heart and offer no ciritcism of their motives, this is a short-sighted evaluation criteria.
In the interest of saving money, church leaders keep using Excel to track church membership and a large paper wall calendar to schedule the facilities and events (plus, more sticky notes and paper than should ever be allowed).
Is it really good stewardship to use these “cheap” options? Sometimes, yes. Other times, it’s short-sighted.
When we developed our company’s facility management scheduling software, I thought that our primary market was to churches that were already using another room / event scheduling software solution. Interestingly, we’ve found that more than half of our new subscribers are still using a wall calendar or Outlook or Google calendars. While these options have their place, as facilities are used for more ministry activities, they fall woefully short of the needed results.
The same applies to how churches process facility service requests and maintenance logs. The preponderance of churches we talk with are stilling using a spreadsheet or legal pad (if anything at all) to track maintenance and facility management issues. To me, that’s unfortunate — not because we want to sell you software, but because God has entrusted us to steward our facilities. In my experience, too many churches fail to take that charge seriously.
4) Change is too hard. The seven most common words of a dying organization are, “We have always done it this way.” With regard to making a ChMS investment, there are several similar retorts which we providers hear most often:
- “We know ‘X’ would save us time … but it’s just too difficult to change.”
- “We know that our current way of doing things is inefficient, but that’s what we’re used to.”
- “We know we could save money, but the pain of change isn’t worth the savings.”
- “It took us forever to get our people to accept the last implementation! We don’t want to ever do that again.”
I realize that many of these cases, if not all, have a sense of validity based on circumstances. But, how often do we use these excuses in lieu of looking for the best way to meet our operational needs and the business aspects of church administration?
So, how do you select your ChMS? Feel free to email me your feedback.
Tim Cool is project executive at Visioneering Studios in Charlotte, NC, and founder of Cool Solutions Group. Since 1986, Cool has served the church community in the areas of construction, facility planning and facility management.
Excellent analysis!