Accelerating the Dynamic Church : Fellowship One

Change or Die?

jhook — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 16:35:00 GMT

We have seen over and over that the biggest hurdle to embracing the real value of better information systems in churches is change management, or should I say the lack thereof? Amongst us church management software vendors, it is even a point of occasional conversation at industry conferences. “If only churches would learn better how to change.” Improvements require change! It is said that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.

I titled this blog entry Change or Die? But adopting new systems and processes in churches is not really a physical life or death situation, is it? So why change? There is not even a profit motive involved to motivate change. What’s the urgency? Why the importance? A better question might be, “If we know we need to change, can we?”

In a recent book called Change or Die, the author, Alan Deutschman, points out that research shows even when change is a life or death matter, change only occurs about 10% of the time! So that is the human state, for every 10 times we need to change, we only accomplish it 1 time! How do we know this? What do we base this on?

In Mr. Deutschman’s book, he refers to the following statistics: about 600,000 individuals have heart bypass surgery every year in the United States, and 1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties – costing our society billions of dollars. These procedures temporarily relieve chest pains, but around half of the time, the bypass grafts clog up in a few years; the angioplasties, in a few months. Why? According to Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at John Hopkins University, “If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyles.” So even in a life or death matter, people refuse to do the work to change.

The church is an institution that asks people to change their lifestyles as well. Not for physical reasons, but for spiritual, emotional and relational reasons. We know this can be hard to accomplish, yet all things are possible through Christ. But, as an industry, I am not sure we understand change well enough to do so because we in fact have difficulty changing ourselves.

Dynamic churches take change seriously. They understand that it will not happen by itself. They understand that it takes leadership, planning and continuous improvements. They know that momentum can be sustained by creating a sense of urgency, by focusing on short-term wins and then communicating and celebrating the positive effects of change. They also know that there are bumps along the way that must be managed through instead of allowing the small setbacks to bog down the ultimate goal. Effective change requires everyone looking forward, focusing on the future, and not allowing people to relish the past and desire to, as one of our customer puts it, “go back to Egypt to make bricks.” Remember, that’s what some of the Israelites wanted to do once they were out in the wilderness heading to the Promise Land. For some of them, the change was simply too hard!

Change management cannot be delegated like some administrative process! To make ministry work, the leadership and ministers must provide firm direction to the staff, not delegate it to their administrative assistants like many other things they tend to do.

Change or Die? Progress or Die? Perhaps it is our flesh and sinful nature that avoids change. But if we don’t learn to change, if we do not learn to embrace better ways of caring for and growing people, the church will become irrelevant and perhaps even die itself. Even more critical, people will die – spiritually.

Grace to you,

jhook

What stops a church from fully Experiencing Fellowship One?

jhook — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:29:00 GMT

As I write this blog entry for our new community site, I contemplated the above question: What stops a church from fully experiencing Fellowship One? There are many different answers for the various customer situations ranging from 1) lack of leadership to drive change, 2) staff turnover, 3) lack of infrastructure for proper Internet access, etc.

Is it ever Fellowship One? Sure, when what a church wants to accomplish is not supported by the product, but situations like that should be determined during the sales cycle, not during implementation; or worse, after six months of trying to use the system. We try our best to help a church discern whether our product is a fit for what they are trying to accomplish because our desired end-result is not a paying customer; but, instead a delighted, “reference-able” customer that pays. Profit is not the goal of our business; it is the result of providing value to the customer.

Back to the question at hand - I believe the most common issue among churches having problems fully experiencing Fellowship One is the change management around processes required to implement the level of change required to implement a true ministry tool rather than a “back-office” system. In other words, business process management.

Recently we hosted Tim Vineyard, Lifeway’s CIO (www.lifeway.com), and some of his key staff members here in our offices to update each other on the progress within our respective organizations. I have met with Tim a couple of times over the course of our business life now and have always been impressed with him personally and professionally. I say this as a big compliment – Tim is a southern gentleman in all ways. He is articulate, engaging and personable.

One of the things that Tim and I agree on is that many churches simply use their church management system as an electronic Rolodex, primarily used for name and address look-up, labels, giving statements, etc. - the simple stuff. This requires very little process or process management. Let’s face it, access to a Rolodex is primarily ad hoc.

We agreed that one thing missing in churches is well-defined business processes. What we have found lacking in churches that attempt to implement change (and implementing Fellowship One, if done right, requires change) is well-thought out, well-documented process diagrams defining who does what resulting in what metrics to measure. Once these metrics can be measured, they can be “baselined” and then tracked to determine whether programs and ministries are being successful. Are people being reached, touched and impacted based on the resources expended?

One of our new goals within our Services group is to document a set of “best practices” business processes to augment the implementation of Fellowship One. By providing swim lane diagrams showing inputs, process flows, outputs, participants, inspection points, etc., church management and staffs can have a visual view of what forms are required, what metrics should be measured, what reports are run when, etc. For the Dynamic Church, hopefully, these process diagrams will function as living documents that are modified as business processes change to incorporate new goals and operations of the church, and to educate new staff members so that the entire church staff can get on the same page when it comes to measuring metrics that reflect the mission and vision of the church.

Grace to you,

Jhook

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

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 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

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

A Whole New Way . . . Software as a Service (SaaS)

Jeff Hook — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 17:19:00 GMT

It appears that the vision and reality of SaaS (Software as a Service) has attracted the largest independent software vendor (ISV), SAP. SAP is a large enterprise application software company out of Germany that created a big craze in the 1990s and obtained a good majority of commercial America to consolidate its data needs under a single umbrella called ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). Evidently, after seeing Salesforce and others begin to erode its mindshare, if not market share, in the small to medium-sized market, the company decided to release its own customer relationship management offering over the web.

Now the only question is whether they can pull off having their customers switch over to their own web offering rather than take the opportunity to shop the other vendors at the same time. That is always a risk when the market begins to change! Many times customer behavior is not anticipated by the incumbent vendor.

I contend that just because a company can produce software for sale does not mean it can keep servers and infrastructure up and running to suit the client requirements. By the same token, although Salesforce.com has successfully blazed the trail in the SaaS world, that does not give it credibility if it chose to come out with a client-server architecture solution. Supporting a different type of solution is a different ball game than what a company and its culture is built to do effectively and efficiently.

If asked by its vendor to consider a new platform offering, a truly wise customer will evaluate its other options before jumping into the new offering of their incumbent vendor. Before automatically jumping into the new solution, ask yourself the following questions:

Is the new solution stable? Is it designed to be used as you want to use it?
If the offering is built on a different technology than the vendor’s “bread and butter” technology? Is the vendor proficient in the technology or just trying it out?
If the new technology does not catch on in the marketplace, will it become orphaned? And perhaps sold, or worse even, mothballed!
Is the new technology fundamentally different or the same in feature / function? If it is the same, should you really switch? If it is different, is it a complete replacement solution or complementary or just a bolt on?
If switching requires a significant amount of change, why not look at other options to see if they match up better to what your organization is trying to accomplish?

I am frequently asked to sell Fellowship One as a site-license and let the customer operate the software on its own servers. Operating a web-based transaction system is more than most churches can take on. And more often than not, those churches that have the fortitude to take on such an endeavor are not fully aware of all the costs to do it right. The infrastructure required to secure the network and the talent and expertise required to keep it up and running is expensive. Even for our largest customers, the Fellowship One monthly fee is a fraction of what it would cost a church to operate it themselves.

Grace to you,

jhook

Milestone . . . 300 Churches and counting!

Jeff Hook — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 17:17:00 GMT

We celebrated our 2nd birthday at the Creative Church Conference on and shortly thereafter signed our 300th church as a Fellowship One partner. January was a good month with the signing of a couple of large mega-churches (churches with over 6,000 in TWA) as well as a host of smaller churches looking for an Internet-based church management solution that they can grow with.

This week, we participated in a conference at The Springs in Ocala, Florida, specifically for plant churches. Fellowship One is ideal for a plant church. No servers to buy, no software to install, just point your browser and go! Then as you grow, we will be there along with you offering the same software the big guys use.

I want to thank fellow blogger, Matt Payne, and his comments about how he believes Fellowship One is a “must have” for fledging churches. Thanks, Matt.

Grace to you,

jhook

A Whole New Way . . . Improving Data Quality through Added Accessibility

Jeff Hook — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 17:16:00 GMT

I have said it before, check out how many staff members in your church are really using your church management system. The more people who use it, the more up-to-date and relevant the information is and will be. I am amazed at the lack of ownership of the data that some churches have concerning the information in their church management system. If the data is inaccurate, the information that comes out cannot be trusted and the reports become suspect.

The following is a very typical case study that we see repeats itself quite often. During the sales process, a prospect will be adamant about the high number of staff members who use their current church management system, usually one of the market leaders that is of the traditional client-server nature. However, during the discovery phase of the implementation process it becomes apparent that although nearly all of the staff have log-ins, most of them actually do not use the centralized system. Instead, other small databases or spreadsheets are created and are used to manage vital church information. The problem is that these ancillary systems contain the most relevant and current information about the congregants and is not shared by the entire staff.

Now I believe that the systems themselves are rarely to blame. Many times it is the lack of processes or the lack of discipline around the processes that are. However, if the entire church staff depends on the central database and not their spreadsheets for the information they need then the added ownership will rally everyone around improving the data quality. This is why easy access from anywhere and everywhere is so important -- in other words, a whole new way of seeing information!

Grace to you,

jhook

A whole new way...

Jeff Hook — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:14:00 GMT

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

Fellowship Technologies is two years old!

Jeff Hook — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 17:13:00 GMT

Well, it is that time of year again – time for the C3 Conference at Fellowship Church. It also the time of year that we celebrate the founding of our company!

I want to thank all of our customers for their on-going support during these past two years. Being a start-up software service offering a new approach to solving a complex problem using a new business model for the “church” industry is not always easy. In fact, it is never easy; and some days it is harder than others. However, when you partner with some awesome churches like our customers and see and hear about some of the exciting ways they are impacting the Kingdom, it is all well worth it!

I also want to thank the employees of Fellowship Technologies and their spouses and families because without their hard work and dedication these past two years it would not be possible. Hopefully our customers are never adversely affected by the sacrifices and trials that we as individuals and families endure because of what we are trying to do for the Kingdom. But without sacrifice, gains can only be limited.

And finally, but certainly not least, I want to publicly thank God for these last two years. Perhaps these words are overused so much that it has become cliché, but Fellowship Technologies and so many of the details around Fellowship One are truly “a God thing.” Thank you, Father!

Thank you for the opportunity to partner with you. We look forward to serving you for many years to come!

Grace to you,

jhook

Why Buy Fellowship One?

Jeff Hook — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 17:12:00 GMT

Since the New Year is upon us, I thought I’d use this blog entry to answer a question I get quite frequently - why do churches buy Fellowship One? A church buys Fellowship One for reasons that are specific to that church. It is really about value and the value that a church places on Fellowship One differs based on the needs of that church. What one church values is not necessarily the same as another. However, the following list does a pretty good job of addressing some of the more popular “value” propositions:

Some churches buy Fellowship One because of our best-in-class check-in system. We have one of the only true touch-screen applications (access to a keyboard and mouse is not required at all) on the market for checking an adult or child into an activity, providing secure system that cannot be circumvented by an estranged parent. This also provides real-time attendance tracking for reporting purposes – no one is required to enter attendance from a manual roll. Additional benefits include helping with classroom load-balancing, closed-loop process with our online registration application, convenience to the congregant because of the speed of the check-in process and the enhanced fellowship associated with the printing (and then wearing) of attractive name tags for all who attend a class or activity.
Other churches are interested in buying a web-based church management system so that their staff and volunteers can access the church information from anywhere and everywhere. As the Internet gets more pervasive and people are doing more and more activities on the web, both business and personal. Churches are also looking at better ways to do things that can take advantage of this new technology platform and the benefits it has to offer. I agree that technology for technology’s sake is inappropriate; however, in many cases the new technology was invented for reasons that are relevant to the church. With Fellowship One, a church staff can get things done where they are and when they need to, not just when they are in the office.
Another significant reason churches buy Fellowship One is the enhanced reporting capabilities. I often hear a church’s current system referred to as the “data input system” or described as “what goes in, does not come out” because although the system may allow for a lot of information to be entered, it is difficult to get that information out. Fellowship One provides a vast library of over 750 standard reports that are configurable by a host of different parameters that provide a virtually endless amount of information for analysis and decision-making. And if a church needs a report that is not currently available, Fellowship Technologies’ Report Central will write it for them. We have several staff members that have the sole job of writing new reports for our customers.
Still other churches buy Fellowship One because of its ability to seamlessly integrate the church’s website to the back-end database. More churches are realizing the benefits of providing “self service” capabilities at the church web site so that the congregation members can perform certain functions themselves without having to call the church office or wait around in the church lobby after service to register for an event, see their year-to-date giving, give online, or complete a volunteer application. This ability limits the calls into the church office and also provides a service that is convenient to the member.
Many churches license Fellowship One to change their way of processing information, and in some cases, their way of thinking. The old paradigm was to have a handful of people enter and report all the information to the many ministries of the organization. These few people would “own” the data and provide a service to others. The new paradigm is built around the premise that the organization and various ministries should take “ownership” of the data and that entry and access of certain information should be dispersed throughout the organization to the people who really have a vested interest into the quality of the data. Too often, when we convert a church’s data from their current system to Fellowship One we are astounded at the number of duplicate people and household records. With all of these duplicates, it is no wonder that the information within the system is not trusted. There have been times that the information within Fellowship One was viewed as suspect by a new customer because of the initial data conversion only to come to the final conclusion that the data has been that way in the old system for quite some time. It’s just that no one had visibility to the problems or that the lack of flexibility of the system forced them to do things a certain way that were really not the way the church needed or wanted it.
A significant number of churches have purchased Fellowship One because of the value they see in going with a hosted solution. The technical aspects of the system are outsourced to the solution vendor and the security of the information is performed by a professional organization that has the resources to protect the data as part of its business. There are two churches in particular that are very appreciative of the hosted model. This is because their data was safe and accessible even though the church buildings and nearly the whole town was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. They were able to quickly set up the church office function at a nearby city and begin contacting people to see how they could be helped. Even more recently, a Texas church was destroyed by a wild fire. Fellowship Technologies has offered to donate a year’s access to Fellowship One to this church to get them up and running as quickly as possible. With Fellowship One, this church’s data will be kept safe and secure in a professionally operated data center that is certified to withstand up to an F5 tornado and has state-of-the-art technology for fire suppression, as well as battery backup and secondary electricity generation capabilities.
And still others buy from Fellowship One because they see the vision that Fellowship Technologies has and where it thinks church management systems should go and want to be a part of that. We hear over and over how our customers appreciate the fact that we are always looking for new ways that our system can enhance ministry and minimize administration. One of my favorite Bible verses is John 10:10 where Christ said that he came that “we might have life, and have in to the full.” Our vision for Fellowship One, coupled with the other products that we are working towards, will definitely help the local church be the best that it can be. In this technology age, doing so without the proper information systems is impractical and irrelevant to the generations that are to come. We are laying that foundation now with a system built to support the main purpose of the church – the needs of the congregation – the people.

Perhaps your church has purchased Fellowship One for other reasons. I would like to hear about those reasons. I would appreciate you taking the time to make a comment to this blog below.

Grace to you as you go out and start the New Year and, perhaps, implement Fellowship One.

Jeff Hook