Even though we participate in more and more conferences every year, because of our heritage, C3 (Fellowship Church’s Creative Church Conference) is a big deal for Fellowship Technologies. We celebrate our founding, we get to see old friends and customers who make the trip from out-of-town and we get to meet new ministers and prospects who have never heard of Fellowship One.
Every year around this time we also choose to launch something new that is significant for our customers. Last year, among the features we launched were a couple of cool features that really helped the user experience: active person (also known as sticky person) and mobile Internet access (using an Internet-enabled cell phone or PDA to access basic congregation information using a smaller format and footprint). This year we are demonstrating a new reporting framework that is being deployed to some beta customers over the next few weeks that we call Reports 2.0. This new framework is not only Ajax-enabled and searchable, but also provides a flexible architecture for us to build upon to enhance the total reporting experience of our customers.
We are also launching a new marketing message to help prospects and customers understand the differences between Fellowship One and the other options out there. A dynamic software company should always be refining its messaging to help the customers better understand the differences between the tough choices they may need to make. Too often though, when a solution provider happens upon a message that resonates with the market, the competitors will think “why didn’t we think of that” and begin to emulate that messaging to try to confuse the customers or to play a “we can do that too, but for less” strategy.
In reality, solutions cannot be compared apples-to-apples, especially if the architectures are different or the business models are not comparable. I like to remind my salespeople of the old adage within the software industry, “any software company can easily change its messaging and sound like they are the same, but it is much tougher to change the code.” Get to know Fellowship Technologies, take a look at how we approach a partnership with our customers, look at how Fellowship One enables ministries, and then determine if we offer a new way of seeing, thinking and being? Check out the new message at www.fellowshiptech.com or come by our booth at C3! See you there!
Grace to you,
jhook