Accelerating the Dynamic Church : ChMS

Dynamic Church 07 is almost here!

Jeff Hook — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 02:56:00 GMT

Are you a Fellowship One customer, but you ask yourself whether your church is really using the system to its full potential? Have I got a deal for you!

Many of our customers have been asking us to sponsor a users’ and developers’ conference and so this year we are. It is being held May 17-19 in Frisco, Texas (just north of Dallas). We are calling it Dynamic Church 07 and it is really going to be worth your while.

I will be speaking about how information technology plays an important role in the Dynamic Church. This is not fluff. After 3 years of observing how some churches succeed wildly with Fellowship One while others underachieve, I will provide in my keynote what it takes to be one of the former and how to avoid the latter.

I will also address how to increase giving without focusing on giving. The lessons to learn from that alone are worth the price of admission! We are talking a definite Return on Ministry for this conference compared to other conferences in that what you learn here will be implementable at your church using Fellowship One.

But there is more! Education tracks from the professionals at Fellowship Technologies who are in the trenches everyday, as well as customer presentations about how they made it work for them. We will also have “hands-on” training and partner exhibits from some companies that can help take your Fellowship One experience to that next level.

And to top it all off, Tony Morgan – you know him as one of the Simply Strategic guys - is the Saturday morning keynote. Tony recently left Granger Community Church, (a Dynamic Church in Southbend, IN), and is now with Newspring (a Dynamic Church in Anderson, SC) – both Fellowship One customers! I consider Tony one of the rock stars of the industry. If you want to understand how to do church better, he can help you understand what is possible. Come see for yourself.

But you better register now, the early discounts are going away soon. The fee for the conference goes up next week. The cheap hotel rates are only guaranteed until then as well. Don’t miss this opportunity to work face-to-face with your favorite voice on the other end of the Technical Support line, or to ask the developer of Data Exchange how to use our API to its fullest, or to ask Product Management about where the product will end up three years from now (if they won’t tell you, I will). All the right people will be there. Don’t delay, register now! I cannot think of a better way to get free consulting.

I hope to see you there! Believe me, it will be worth it!

Grace to you,

jhook

Solution Selling includes educating the church on Best Practices

Jeff Hook — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:43:00 GMT

Last night I received a call from the field from one of our Delivery Managers. For Fellowship Technologies, a Delivery Manager is a consultant who works with a church partner (customer) to assist them with their implementation of Fellowship One. The purpose of the call was that the Delivery Manager wanted me to know that the church partner could not say enough about how much they learned about church management from our sales consultant during the sales cycle.

BTW, we now have 12 different editions, all the same software, but twelve different ways to license Fellowship One because not all churches want to use it the same way – but I will save that post for another day. The point of this post is how much the partner learned during the sales cycle.

To me, this was very rewarding. Why? Because it says that we are being successful when it comes to our mission of not just selling church software but also helping churches understand what good church management is and, in the end, improving churches’ ability to help people! When people talk about the business of the church too often they talk about the “back office” aspects of the church.

However, the real “business” of the church is people; from helping deal with their “heart” conditions to their “life” conditions. Church management software needs to be ministry-focused software, not administrative-focused software. Sometimes we run into a church that has documented all of these features that they want their software to have but these features are all about how to make the software perform better to their “work habits” around reading email, keeping their calendar, or even turning on the HVAC 2 hours before the service time. Now all of these might be well and good, but I truly think they miss the point.

Our sales consultants try to convey the need for the software to focus on the needs of the people attending the church – that is where the real value is. In his book, “How to Increase Giving in Your Church,” George Barna says that people who share an ownership or personal connection to a church tend to give more. In other words, the more connected a person is, spiritually and emotionally, the more generous the giving. The more generous the giving, the more resources the church has for quality services and reaching more people. So if this is true, shouldn’t church management software help track how connected a person is and help then encourage additional connection?

If all church management software is just alike (like some of our competitors want you to think), why aren’t our competitors selling the same way? Instead they sell on “features and functions.” I can say this because I have seen their sales demos. It is not about features and functions; it is about how you use those features and functions. It is about processes and the impact of those processes – both on the church congregation and church staff.

Grace to you,

Jhook

Good Software Stewardship?

Jeff Hook — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 21:20:00 GMT

Sometimes we come across a church that puts a halt to a software selection process because they come to the realization that they may not need a new church management software solution. Why? Because they find out that they are underutilizing what they currently have. Of course, many times they are encouraged to not look for another solution by their current vendor who claims the system they have can do exactly what Fellowship One does, they are just not using those features. It is rarely the case that this is actually true. But the church must go through the process of looking at what their current vendor has before buying off on another purchase. Case in point: why buy new if you are not using what you currently have? Maybe you do not need a new system to get the benefits you are hoping to get with a new system if your current software has the capabilities; you are just not using them!

Now my contention is that there is perhaps a reason why a church is not using its current system to the max that still requires a change – maybe the system does not do what you need it to do to support your ministry; or perhaps it is not user-friendly; or costs too much to maintain or breaks when you do try to maintain or upgrade it; or performs so poorly it is practically unusable! If any of these are the case then shopping for a new solution is warranted. However, many times a system is not used to its full extent because the staff does not have the discipline to change or learn something new or even, heaven forbids, the staff has become lazy or complacent.

If this is the case, changing systems will not provide the benefits desired no matter what solution is in place; the staff is not willing to do what is required to get the desired results. It is like the athlete who wants to win the Olympics but is not willing to do the amount of training required to really compete. Becoming a “world class church” is similar to becoming a “world class athlete,” it does not happen without doing the right things, doing the right things right and then doing the right things better. Continually!

As an example, I will use a tale of two churches who are both current customers of ours. This is an actual case study of true circumstances, but I will spare the names to protect the innocent. However, there probably more than one church of each type within our customer base. Do not be offended if you think I am using your church as an example; if it is your actual church, I did get permission.

Both churches held a “Fall Festival” as an outreach event into the community and to show a less “gruesome” way to celebrate Halloween. Both churches subscribe to a Fellowship One edition that allows for “check-in” of any and all activities. However, only one of these churches chose to “check-in” their Fall Festival. That church checked in nearly 2,000 attendees to their event; more than what they serve during their typical weekend services. The other church chose not to conduct “check-in” at the event even though their license agreement encourages them to do so – it does not cost anymore!

The church that chose to conduct “check-in” put their best foot forward because they showed their community that it was technologically savvy and showed that safety of their kids was job #1; but more importantly, even before the event was over, because of real-time attendance tracking, they knew that 92% of those in attendance were 1^st time visitors to their church. 92% - I would say that was a successful outreach event! The church that did not conduct check-in can only guess at how many attendees were first-time visitors and can only surmise as to whether its event was successful at bringing in new faces.

The real key to growth and determining success of the Fall Festival for the first church mentioned will be to track how many of those people actually make it to church within the next month and then how many are still there in six months. From that, the church can determine its ROM (Return on Ministry) for that event for that year which will help determine if that event was a good use of funds and whether none, less or more money should be budgeted for the next year. The second church mentioned cannot do any of that analysis because it did not capture who attended in the first place. There are perhaps other ways to capture the information (roll cards, etc.) but none more accurate and efficient than at the POS (Point of Service).

Everyone can make better decisions when they have more and better information. I encourage you to take the guess work out of the decision-making process at your church by capturing, tracking, and analyzing as much information as you can. Capturing the data does not need to be laborious. A check-in station can be used as a POS device for more than just “children’s check-in.” By checking in all of your church’s activities, you build a foundation of data that can help capture how successful an event is and how “plugged-in” people are – now that’s measuring assimilation! Using all the capabilities of your church management system will help you truly know whether it is the right one for your church or not. It also allows you to get the most "value" out of your solution. It is just good software stewardship!

Grace to you,

Jhook

IT Headcount – How “loaded” is your team?

Jeff Hook — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 01:18:00 GMT

I recently returned from a lunch with the head of IT for a mega-church here in Dallas, who also happens to be one of our customers. One of his parting comments was one I have heard him say several times before about the size of his IT staff versus that of the typical mega-church in America.

The comment refers to the fact that many of his counterparts are amazed that this church does not have programmers that develop applications for the church. He consistently tells them that with Fellowship One, the church’s application needs are more than adequately addressed, especially compared to something they could build on their own using the same dollars. At other large mega-churches, he has seen five, six or in one case, 12 IT staffers to support the IT needs of the church. For what purpose? So they can develop a series of capabilities that the church needs now, only to have it change when the church grows and the needs change. In this mega-church’s case, to support a church staff of around 200, he has a staff of three, none of which are “programmers.”

When a church considers meeting its IT needs, it must consider not just the cost, but the effort and risks associated with recruiting and retaining solid IT talent. Here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, finding top IT talent is a challenge even for a company like Fellowship Technologies - and being the home of a good number of universities and the “Telecom Corridor,” we probably have an easier time than most. Unless a church wants to go “off shore”, IT resources in this country are not going to get any more abundant or any less expensive – there are just too many opportunities for the number of graduates coming out of colleges and tech schools.

As a result, many churches are attracted to the long term value proposition of a Software as a Service (SaaS) because they realize the pressure this relieves in having to constantly keep up with the ever increasing need to invest in the scarce resource called IT personnel. That said, we also see a resistance on the part of those very resources not wanting their church to embrace SaaS because of the infringement on their careers and thus livelihood. However, more IT staffs are beginning to realize that the only way they can meet the ever increasing information needs of the church staff and congregation is such an offering. And instead of threatening their position, these IT personnel begin to realize that it frees them up to do other more unique things that the church requires including managing an ever increasing set of IT providers from telecom to audio/video, improving the church’s website to always meet the needs of the various ministries and teaching the congregation how to protect their children from the worldly exposures of the world wide web!

In most churches I have seen, the demands on the IT personnel are greater than their capacity to deliver – not because of the quality of the people, but due to the extent of all the things asked of them relative to the budget they are given. I honestly believe that churches can extend the value of their IT dollars by off-loading the applications to a Software as a Service vendor. As my earlier posts on F1 pricing conveyed, consider the costs of the components, consider the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and consider the overall value of what is provided and how it can be utilized; SaaS is the cost-effective means to providing the information needs of a church. Sure, you can “buy” a church database that functions as a glorified Rolodex for less than the monthly or annual fee of a SaaS, but its limited functionality provides such limited value.

Grace to you as you go out to best utilize your IT personnel,

jhook

Cost Considerations – Part 3: Value

Jeff Hook — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 02:09:00 GMT

In part 3 of my 3 part series on software cost consideration I will address the value-based pricing concept and explore why the value that the software provides is more important than the out-of-pocket direct costs, or for that matter, the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

When considering what software solution to buy, the real measurement to take into account is the “value” that the organization or people within the organization receive from the implemented solution. Case in point, we find that many churches have had our competitors’ solutions in-house for several years, yet the solution is so underutilized (meaning that it is not being used for one or more reasons: too hard to learn, lack of availability, does not do what the users need, etc.) that no matter how cheap the system appears to be, the church is over-paying because it provides so little value.

The problem with the value concept for software justification is that it varies significantly from church to church because what individual churches value varies greatly. The components or line item categories are usually transferable across churches, but the level of value will differ. Some of this variance is attributed to what “value” the individual church places on certain capabilities.

Let me present some examples to help clarify:

What “value” do a church and its congregation place on being able to “quickly” and safely check-in children for Sunday services?

It affects the brand of the church – how people perceive the church and the Sunday experience. There is definite value to the brand; but if the church does not understand branding, the value is not perceived.
It affects the convenience provided to the congregants. This also affects the Sunday experience; especially for first-timers. But if the church is not focused on seekers, then visitor first impressions are not valued.
It affects the security that a parent “feels” when they drop their children off for the first time in an unknown church. Again, seeker sensitive churches value that first-time experience so much more than inward focused churches.

What “value” does a church derive from being able to offer activity registrations from the church website?

If the church does very few during-the-week or special activities, then the perceived value of this feature is smaller than for a church that conducts a lot of activities and is looking for a better way to administer them.
We recently received an email from a customer that claimed that Fellowship One WebLink saved their church over 1,000 man-hours in administering one of their activities. Now that’s value!

What “value” does a church assign to the accountability of being able to track whether congregation contact items are followed up quickly by the right people?

Believe or not, some churches do not place value on this kind of accountability – so having such a feature in the system, although I would consider it part of the value proposition of why we cost what we do, is not considered when determining the cost-justification of a new church management system.
To other churches, this is huge value because they believe that caring for their congregation needs in a timely matter one of their primary jobs. But if a church does not culturally appreciate a quick follow-up to information requests, then no matter how much we “preach” its importance, it is viewed as superfluous functionality.

What “value” does a church associate with the church staff and volunteers being able to easily access its information from anywhere there is Internet access?

If the church staff works from home a lot, or travels a lot, this can be of significant value.
I was recently at a conference where one of the church staff was actually half listening to the conference and half doing F1 work via the wireless network. She was getting value.

I could go on with example after example of how a church management system can provide value to any church. But the value is particular to the church’s behavior, culture, focus and the implementation of the system’s capabilities. For any given church, if all of this value could be captured and documented, then the justification for a web-based church management system would be easy. But because it is particular to a given church, it is more difficult to provide a standard set of savings guidelines. And some of the savings are not savings at all, but actual “value creation” – value above and beyond what is currently done.

Take a look, what do you value? Is it the same thing that the congregation values? Can you increase your congregation’s experience by capturing some value that you are not even seeing at this time? Or are you walking over dollars to pick up dimes?

Grace to you as you go out and give value,

jhook

Cost Considerations – Part 2: TCO – Total Cost of Ownership

Jeff Hook — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 13:07:00 GMT

In part 2 of my 3 part series on software cost consideration I will address the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) concept and why the price of software itself, whether it is a SaaS (Software as a Service) or of the client-server flavor, is just a portion of what needs to be taken into account when considering your software alternatives.

To start with, let’s define Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). TCO was originally developed in the late 1980’s by the technology research firm Gartner to determine the cost of owning and deploying personal computers. Although a new concept at the time, over the years it has been examined and refined to the point that it is now one of the more relied upon methodologies to evaluate the true cost of deploying computer systems. Basically, TCO consists of the direct and indirect costs incurred throughout the life cycle of a computer system, including deployment, on-going operations, maintenance and support, as well as the user costs associated with the business operation.

Direct costs are usually visible and sometimes are even budget line items to themselves. They include hardware and systems software, acquisition and on-going maintenance; operations which includes technical operations, help desk support, network costs, computer room space and utilities, such as electricity and cooling; and, administration costs associated with the above like technical and database personnel.

Indirect costs are always not so visible and may be dispersed across the church’s entire staff and congregation, including how its congregation interacts with the church for “church business and congregation administration.” Typically, the magnitudes of these costs dwarf the direct costs because it is spread over so many different areas of the church. So, to accurately measure TCO, the analysis must include all “end user” operations, including contribution reporting, event registration, children’s check-in, small group administration, volunteer recruitment and management, etc.

Another indirect factor that affects operations is system availability. Not having the ability to process and get to information when needed is a real, although many times hidden, cost. If the system is down for maintenance, it is not available for users to conduct their work - the more users who are affected, the larger the financial impact.

With a SaaS, most of the direct costs associated with the functionality of the application are rolled into the monthly or annual access fee paid to the solution provider. So when comparing on-going monthly costs, churches need to consider how much they spend to keep their member database operational. Many churches hire outside consultants to help write reports, defragment the database, and install software upgrades across all the PC’s at the church for the typical client-server system.

In our experience, many churches maintain multiple databases in their various ministries because their primary congregational database is not complete, not easy-to-use and/or is missing needed functionality. One of our recent customers was maintaining seven different databases that were never synchronized in trying to support its ministries. After converting to Fellowship One, they were able to shut down the conflicting information stores and move to a single consolidated system.

Another hidden but huge cost to consider is the operational costs associated with bad processes or bad information. As I have blogged about before, I’ve been dismayed at how poor the data management practices of churches really are. And churches seem to simply accept the concept of bad data – aren’t they aware of the adage: garbage in, garbage out? A friend of mine who heads up IT for a large church that has one of the leading client-server church management systems recently commented that frankly he did not know how much the old system was really “costing” his church, but he knows it is significant and a lot more than what they just pay to the vendor.

In my next blog, I will explore what I consider to be the most important concept associated with system cost considerations – Value. Something to think about, as long as the out-of-pocket costs are affordable, isn’t it the value of the things that can be done with the information more important than the costs themselves? If the value far surpasses the cost, then are the costs justified?

Grace to you,

jhook

Cost Considerations – Part 1: What does my monthly cost include?

Jeff Hook — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 01:35:00 GMT

This blog entry is the first of three planned blog entries concerning Fellowship One pricing. Subsequent entries will address the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) concept and a look at the Value-based Pricing (VBP) concept of software.

At the recent NACBA conference in Chicago, Jeff Pelletier and I conducted a break-out workshop about Fellowship One. I started out the presentation with a series of myths and misconceptions concerning Fellowship Technologies and our flagship product, Fellowship One. Among the misconceptions I presented was around the belief that Fellowship One is expensive.

First, let’s understand that the term expensive is a relative term. I will talk more about that in the Value-Based Pricing discussion, but for now let’s assume that the relativity of the word “expensive” is a non-issue; let’s first look at what a church gets for its monthly fee.

When a church compares the monthly cost of Fellowship One to its current solution, many people note that the cost is often several times to many times more expensive than what they are used to paying for their current system. However, in most cases, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison. When comparing software solutions, one should consider everything the entire church, not just a few core users, is getting for that price.

For any system, legacy or new, a church must consider the incremental cost to not only buy but to also maintain the system. True, a church can save some money by cutting corners and not doing certain things they ought to (system back-ups come to mind!), but for discussion purposes here, I will consider that churches perform the duties that are recommended in conjunction with all computer systems. So what does a F1 customer get for its money?

With Fellowship One, the monthly cost includes not just access to an enterprise software solution (this would be the licensing portion), but also the following:

Up-to-date, fully-redundant, hardware (currently 3 full racks of servers) to operate the transactions;
Up-to-date application and operating system software to operate the hardware;
Unparalleled security when compared to what the church can offer locally; Your data is housed in a Tier-1 data center capable of withstanding an F5 tornado (twice the strength of a Category 5 hurricane); And we submit regular external security scans to further ensure your data.
Regular on-site and off-site data backups; We backup your data continually and take a copy off-site regularly. If your church office is destroyed, your data is safe with us and can be accessed from any Internet access point.
New software features and capabilities which are constantly being developed;
“No touch, no sweat” upgrades – these new capabilities are automatically added to the system without customer intervention;
Applications assistance through calls and emails into our technical support group with the broadest support coverage in the industry – Standard support is available 6am to 10pm CT, 7 days per week and emergency support is available round-the-clock; Although not perfect by any stretch, we consistently receive high accolades from our customers about our support.
A broad base of knowledge concerning church best practices from our Delivery Services group who have implemented F1 across our entire install base;
Proactive customer care based on our monitoring of the system’s usage to ensure that the capabilities are being best utilized and to help in those cases were portions of the system is left idle.

Now consider the following questions in comparing what you currently get from your church software vendor:

What hardware and system software does your system operate on? Both of these areas advance so quickly that for many it is hard to stay up with. Is your IT staff or consultant always keeping your systems up-to-date?
Are you doing all of the required system maintenance? Are data backups performed every night? What happens if a hurricane or fire destroys the church? How secure is your data, could someone simply break an window and take off with your server(s)?
Does your current ChMS vendor help you get the most out of the system? Or are you left on your own when it comes to implementation best practices and support?
What is the quality of your vendor’s support responses and when are they available? Many of our customers have said that they first came looking for a new solution because they could not get their current vendor to return their phone calls. And when is the vendor’s support available? Most are only available on THEIR schedule, 8 – 5pm, Monday to Friday. Sadly, many are not available during the most critical period for a church, the weekend.
How was the last upgrade by your vendor supplied? Many of our customers came from an environment where they were afraid to install a new release for fear that it would takes weeks or even months to recover from the new bugs introduced into the system. If that’s the case, what new features are you missing out on? With Fellowship One, our customers are always on the latest and greatest release.
If you are not using the features of your current system, how does your vendor help you implement the other things you are paying for? Do they even know whether you are using the system to its full extent? At Fellowship Technologies, we recently established a “Customer Care” group to proactively assist our customers to get the most out of Fellowship One. We think this will improve the adoption rate of some of the system’s most valuable capabilities.

As you can see, what a Fellowship One customer receives is far beyond simply a disk and some documentation. Now that you know all that is included, in my next blog I will address the Total Cost of Ownership of a software solution. This should help a church determine all things that come into the equation when considering the “true cost” of its current system.

Grace to you,

jhook

What does your church management system have to do with your brand?

Jeff Hook — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 16:49:00 GMT

When a church considers its brand, does it ever think about its church management system? Often, when a church thinks of its brand, it thinks about its outreach message—meaning the logo, web site, and marketing, but rarely does it consider its church management system. Quite often, the church management system is just referred to as “the database.” However, included in the brand is the entire “customer experience,” or in this case, “congregant experience.”

So if that’s the case, included in the brand is the style of music, the style of message-delivery, such as Bible-based preaching, story-telling illustrative, or Bible teaching, and, believe it or not, the execution of the church processes, whether it be detailed, casual, non-existent, or something else entirely.

In the commercial world, the personality of the company can be characterized by competitive criteria like customer intimacy, operational excellence, and price. Churches are characterized by these same terms—and, on occasion, by less flattering ones.
When it comes to your church management system, does it add to the brand? If the church is family focused, do you have a check-in system that helps secure the children from being picked up by an estranged dad involved in a custody battle with his wife? This adds security consciousness to the brand.

Is attendance automatically posted so that Monday morning the youth pastor can follow-up with the kids that normally attend but have now missed 3 services in a row? This adds customer, or, for our purposes, congregant intimacy to the brand.

Does your system provide self-service capabilities that allow a person to register for an event online at the church website instead of wait in yet another line in the lobby after service? Can a person give online at the church website or do they have to continue to carry their checkbook to service? These add convenience to the brand.

These “congregation experiences,” as well as many others, define the church’s brand, something the church can’t decide. The church members influence and encourage certain aspects, but the community around the church actually brands it. It doesn’t have to be valid or accurate. The congregants define their “target brand” and reinforce behaviors necessary to meet that target.

But how each individual experiences the church contributes to the overall brand because they tell someone their opinions about the church. If John Smith tells his friend Frank about the church he visited last Sunday, he may well influence Frank’s attitude when he visits that church. Word-of-mouth becomes essential because people come with a certain set of expectations.

What you think of American Airlines or Coca-Cola, for example, is primarily based on experience or reputation, even before you use a product.

So many things affect what people think when it comes to brand. I think the brand of the Mavericks is affected by what people think of Mark Cuban, the owner. Similarly, a church’s brand is affected by what people think and feel about the senior pastor.

So answer the question: how does your church management system contribute positively to your brand?

Grace to you,

jhook

Queuing Theory at Check-in

Jeff Hook — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 16:48:00 GMT

After recently watching several churches modify their process for children’s check-in to accommodate our check-in module, it occurred to me how much “queuing theory” comes into play. How a church establishes its check-in queue can make all the difference whether a family believes they are waiting a long time or not.

Consider this: if the queue is spread out across multiple check-in stations, when a family comes up to check-in, 1) the person has some ownership in the line they have chosen (think WalMart – side note: why do I always chose the slow moving line?); and, 2) if there are 5 check-in stations, with 10 families at the same time, the family perception is that the line is 2 deep; 15 families create lines 3 deep.

Conversely, if there is a single queue that is feed to multiple stations, 1) the person has no ownership in the line chosen, it’s the luck of the position; and 2) with 10 families, one family feels like they are in a line 5 deep; 15 families means someone is 10 back and perceives a very long line.

Using this approach, there is also the “wait” in queue time that comes from seeing that a spot is open at one of the check-in stations and the delay to fill that open spot.

If your church’s check-in lines seem too long, there are several things you can do: 1) consider adding more check-in stations, 2) speed up the overall process, or 3) increase the amount of time before check-in is available.

Or maybe it’s just a queuing issue? Look at how people are fed into the check-in stations. Consider how the “wait time” between check-ins be reduced or eliminated?

Grace to you,

jhook

Is your church management system optional? (Part 2)

Jeff Hook — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 16:43:00 GMT

A fundamental building block that will allow a church to better care for its people is better quality information. However, if the church’s ministries are allowed to NOT use the church management system and its underlying database of people, they will end up keeping valuable information somewhere else. That central database is then a subset of the information about the congregation. If a pastor cannot look at a family’s or individual’s records to see what their current indicative information is, how involved they are, what small groups they are in, who their kids are, etc., etc. – then they have an incomplete picture of who they are attempting to help. That kind of data problem becomes a “congregation service” problem similar to a “customer service” problem that any organization that deals with the public might have when the information they have is incomplete.

True, I was simply pointing out the problem, but churches cannot fix problems they are unaware of or do not have an appreciation for. Too often churches “play” at church instead of “work” at church. When people “play” they are doing something for recreation, for enjoyment and leisure purposes. When people work, there is a sense of accountability, people measure performance and work towards improving the metrics. Now I am not saying that ALL churches are like that, but too many are. If churches refuse to measure themselves and their performance, they will not know whether or not they are improving.

To answer your last question, culture change is a tricky situation because I am unaware of the dynamics of your current culture. I cannot help you get somewhere if I do not know where you are coming from. Also, frankly, some cultures are worth the effort to change and some may not be. In general, cultural change requires leadership. Some churches may not be able to institute this kind of change without a “burning platform” crisis.

The Harvard Management Communication Letter says if you don't have a burning platform to push people away from the past then you need a compelling vision of the "The Promised Land" that is strong enough to draw people to it. In identifying the burning platform, do not overstate the extent of the crisis, it warns, or you will destroy credibility. And involve everyone in the solution or they will go in all directions.

On a tactical level, begin a project to identify all of the current data sources in place that the ministries rely on – every database, spreadsheet, 3x5 cards, etc. By documenting these, a church can have an appreciation for the inconsistencies of the data – how out of date some is, how many duplicates there are, and a better picture of the total number of ‘silo’ data stores.

Once there is an appreciation of the level of the problem, look at the congregation service issues that arise from the disparate databases. Ask yourself how much “customer service” can improve if all ministries are singing from the same hymnal; I mean working off the same information. If everyone is responsible for the quality of the data, although it creates work, the data quality will improve. Caring about people is also caring about the information that is a reflection of those people. Hope this helps!

Grace to you,

Is your church management system optional?

Jeff Hook — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 16:42:00 GMT

I have been working with churches and their church management systems for nearly three years and one of the things that I find interesting is the fact that for some churches the ministries use of the central database is optional! The reasons vary from: the system does not do what we need it to do; it is too hard to use; there is not enough process discipline by the staff to use the same system.

Many churches we come across only have one or two people focused on the central database with the folks out in the ministries vying for themselves to collect and maintain the information. The responsibility for the quality of the data then resides with just a handful of people. However, the ministers and volunteers who actually work with the congregation are relegated to keeping their contact information in their personal files, Excel or perhaps a departmental solution like a Filemaker Pro database. Wherever the information is kept, rarely is it reconciled back to the main membership database. Does anyone else see a problem with this picture?

So the real question to ask, “Is your database an optional data source, an available data source or THE data source for your church?” If it is not the latter and you are not performing a synchronization of the databases, then whether you know it or not, you have a data problem. Data problems will manifest itself as a failed ministry and that, at the end of the day, isn’t that we are all accountable for?

Grace to you,

jhook

Is this your church without Fellowship One? Want to know what it can be?

Jeff Hook — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 16:40:00 GMT

This is a great story by someone who evidently goes to a church without Fellowship One. It is a story about The Church with the T-Rex in its lobby. Would someone attending your church have a similar experience?

Many times we are so familiar with our church and the experience that we have in it that we do not take into account the experience of others who may be trying to navigate our facilities and processes (or lack there of!) for the first time. I am reading First Impressions: Creating Wow Experiences in Your Church by one of our Granger brethren, Mark L. Waltz. It is a very good read for those who want some insight into how Granger does what they do so well. The one thing about a first impression, you never get another chance to make it!

Also check out CloseTheBackDoor.com and mouse over some of the people’s heads in the picture. Are they any different than the Holy Mama in the T-Rex story? Have you taken a fresh look at what people are experiencing at your church? Are you following up on their requests? How long does it take to check in their children? Are the facilities clean? Is it convenient to sign-up for an activity or do I have to send an e-mail to someone and wait for them to respond? Or worse, do I have to hang out in the lobby and wait in line to register for said activity? Is there the energy of inspired (in Spirit!) volunteers who are showing them where things are located? Or is it sort of drab, uninspiring, lacking energy? The God I worship is anything but drab and uninspiring!

Grace to you as you go out to find that T-Rex for your lobby,

Jhook

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Modifying Packaged Software – Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!

Jeff Hook — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 16:38:00 GMT

In my last blog, I commented about the difficulty of a church writing its own software. In my humble opinion, an even worst business practice than a church writing its own software is modifying a software package that was designed to support another industry or feature set. This is just a bad idea, period. I remember trying to do that as a consultant with a major management consulting firm in the 1990’s. In the end, we were wasting the clients’ money. By the time we were ready to deploy, the vendor was out with a set of modifications that was needed to fix major issues with their code or the upgrade was required in order to be eligible for support.

So what are the real problems with this approach?

1) If you are building upon an already mature product, how long will it be before the vendor is required to upgrade the technology platform in order to support its core business? One of the truisms about technology is that it is constantly changing. Whether you believe that to be a problem or an opportunity, either way, it is a fact. Are you prepared to keep changing (time, dollars and fortitude) as the vendor changes the underlying plumbing? If the vendor chooses not to improve the technology, than you have limited the life of your investment from the outset.

2) If you are building upon an immature product set, it is like building on quicksand. The underlying structure is going to be changing all the time, causing an emotional pain that borders on insanity. The feeling of redoing the same changes over and over will drive your team crazy or fuel the business of an outside organization for as long as your pocketbook can sustain it.

The only viable way to modify vendor software is to really not modify it at all. Instead, design and code to the vendor’s API (Application Programming Interface) which is designed specifically for extending its application. Even when the underlying architecture then changes, should the vendor decide that such a change is necessary, the modifications to the API can be backward compatible based on a version control method that should be part of the vendor’s API framework.

Fellowship One offers Data Exchange, an XML API that allows our customers to integrate and extend the Fellowship One application.

Grace to you,

jhook

Writing Your Own Church Management Software – Is it really a good idea?

Jeff Hook — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 16:25:00 GMT

I am always skeptical of a church that even contemplates writing its own Church Management System (ChMS). In fact, even before I was involved with the spin out of what was known as Switch at the time from Fellowship Church, I questioned the church’s efforts of writing its own software. It is a complex and expensive endeavor. Put simply: writing software is not a core competency of any church.

Sometimes a church believes it needs to write its own software so that it can get exactly what it wants and needs. This has been tried in the corporate world for quite a long time, with very limited success, even by the very large companies that have a lot more financial resources than a church - thus the success of the SAPs and Oracles of the world. Unfortunately, what a church needs or wants will most certainly change before the software is designed completely, let alone programmed and tested. Even still, once the church feels all the work is complete the application will need to be supported, fixing bugs, process improvements, etc. To minimize the time lag of these changes, the proper way to design applications is to build it to be flexible, configurable, almost pliable, so that as the needs or strategies of the church change, the system can be easily tweaked to allow the software to conform to theses changes.

However, a church does not have the time, money or inclination to contemplate what changes will be needed in the future, let alone the time and money to test out all the various behaviors of a system based on the potential application variations. One of our challenges was that very thing – how do we support church processes that were not contemplated or needed by Fellowship Church. Other churches should not be required to “do church” the same way as the original architects of Fellowship One had designed it. The result has been a significant rewrite of certain areas of the application so that a church can “do church” the way they want or need to. Today, Fellowship One is being used by hundreds of different churches of every shape, size, and denomination.

Grace to you,

jhook

New Functionality... Reports 2.0

Jeff Hook — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 17:22:00 GMT

Fellowship Technologies recently released our new reporting functionality we call Reports 2.0. Reports 2.0 is our foundational work that will help move Fellowship One reporting to a whole new level. This new release really leverages the power of AJAX so that the screens do not refresh when reporting parameters are changed or selected. The parameters are also defaulted to the most likely or most frequently used parameters. This will make running reports much, much easier for the typical user.

(Another powerful advantage to the "hosted", Software as a Service (SaaS) model over traditional "client-installed" solutions is that we released these new features to ALL of our customers with no action required on their part. No additional fees to upgrade. Nothing to install or download or convert. They simply went to bed one evening and they woke up the next day, logged into Fellowship One, and there were the new features accompanied by detailed help files, tutorials, and free training webinars.)

Reports 2.1 should be available towards the end of March and will offer the ability to save your reporting parameters under “My Reports” so that all of your common reports can be run without entering re-entering parameter values. Reports 2.1 will also offer other ease of use features but I won’t go into those just yet; I do not want to ruin the surprise of some great new features. Later this year we will be offering several other reporting tools and enhancements that will make the Fellowship One experience even better and more robust – features that no other vendor currently has on the market.

Grace to you,

jhook