By Michael Jordan
You don’t need new church management software.
Traditional ChMS is old, antiquated and isn’t best suited to help your ministry grow the right way. Why get another software system that shares similarities to the one you currently have? They’ll both just continue to underperform and eat up too much of your time.
(Was that attention-grabbing enough?)
If so, let’s talk about some common reasons why your church might need to get out of the old and choose a solution that can serve your whole church.
- You’re still using a cobbled-together system of several different pieces of software from different vendors.
- You have to be in the office at church to do your work, but you need to be out and about.
- Your congregants can’t edit their own contact information, access their giving history, or make contributions online.
If any of these statements ring true, there’s good news: There are whole-church, web-based solutions on the market that are 100-percent different from the old way of doing things — and also economical.
These solutions are different because they aren’t just about data-gathering and number-crunching. Of course, they do have these capabilities; at heart, however, they’re about engaging and connecting people.
Unlike traditional church management software programs that rely on the quality of data entered by staffers, web-based, whole-church solutions totally handle this aspect of work when people connect with various church activities.
When you’re using one platform for your entire church, staff can manage important information about members and provide a way to keep a pulse on the church during the week.
To be most effective, you need a solution that can be a real-life, every day tool which can literally fit in your pocket. It needs to be a solution — not a software — that blends needed record-keeping with church data to keep staff better equipped and ready to meet the daily challenges they face.
It should also enable you to take care of frequent tasks easily and be better prepared to give the special attention to personal connections on a daily basis.
Frankly, you need a web-based solution that allows for church staff to:
- Manage small groups
- Easily view key data elements with drill-down abilities
- Track member involvement and assimilation
- Access data securely
- Review contribution records
- Check in for events, classes, etc.
- Send mass emails.
With a modern, 100-percent web-based software solution, you’ll have something that’s just as vital to the church’s congregation as it is staff. Congregants need to have a connecting point throughout the week to keep them tied to what’s happening with the church and their fellow parishioners.
In addition, they need a tool that can search, sign up for and stay connected to small groups, as well as allow them to review their giving history and manage any recurring gifts they might have planned.
For church members, web-based solutions make it easy to:
- Make online contributions
- Check event schedules
- View or print personal giving statements / history
- Post news and statuses
- Email contacts
- Update and maintain their contact and personal information.
The total package
You need a true whole-church solution — nothing to install, there’s no need to worry about backups, hardware or updates.
So, what are you waiting for? The time to make the switch from old and outdated is now.
Michael Jordan is a marketing strategist for ACS Technologies headquartered in Florence, SC, with offices in Phoenix, Seattle and Greenville, SC.
