2008 was another exciting year for the team at Fellowship Technologies. Everyone working
here feels very blessed to have the opportunity to bring advanced technology to
the local church -- to help you more effectively care for people, efficiently manage
resources, and enable real growth.
Thinking back over the past year at Fellowship Technologies,
here are a few of the highlights that come to mind.
Dynamic Church
Conference ‘08 - We had an awesome time with our customers, prospects, and
partners at our annual user conference in May 2008. Some of the highlights are recapped
here. All of the training and session materials, and photos from the
conference, are located
here. Don't forget to register now
for the 2009 conference at www.DynamicChurchConference.com.
Product Releases -
Customers posted and voted on many ideas on the Experience community site and
we listened. We developed and released a number of the top requested
enhancements like changes to Check-in, Report Library, WebLink, Mass Action,
Parents Of... Children of, Temporary Groups, many foundational elements for
Groups, and much, much more. The release notes for all of these are available
here. We also finished work on a complete redesign
of the Household/Individual pages that will be released on January 21st,
2009.
Expansion into a
second data center - In December we expanded into a secondary data center
run by Savvis, a premiere hosting company
with a global presence. We are operating portions of Fellowship One out of this
new location and will be expanding our footprint there throughout 2009 and
beyond.
Focus on Customer
Effectiveness - We reorganized a few departments in October with a focus on
the effective use of Fellowship One by our customers. This group comprises
roughly one-third of the entire Fellowship Tech staff. You can learn more about
the new team and their objectives here.
We are also working hard to improve
our lines of communication and share best
practices.
Return On Ministry
- We released a new marketing site, www.ReturnOnMinistry.com,
that helps to communicate our message about the importance of metrics in a fun
and creative way.
Moved into a new
office - On December 15th we moved into our new corporate
offices located at 6363 N State Hwy 161, Suite 200, Irving, TX 75038. Being a
product company, our development team is very important to us. You can check
out a few photos of their unique work environment from the blog of one of our
latest new hires. We are very thankful to have such an awesome working
environment for our team.
Phenomenal growth
Fellowship Technologies grew rapidly again through 2008. We finished they year just shy of 1,000 customers in 9 different countries. We are approaching 5 million
Fellowship One page loads per week across 25,000 portal users. Churches used
Fellowship One to send over 60 million (yes... million) email messages (no need
for the extra expense of a tool like Constant Contact), they accepted nearly 1
million online donations via Credit Card and eCheck, and processed roughly 500,000
online event registrations through Fellowship One WebLink.
Looking forward to
2009
While we are thankful for the many blessings of 2008 and we are
even more excited about 2009. We have a number of very exciting things to be
announced and released in the first quarter (Sorry, I can't tell you just yet),
another user conference
coming in May, and some ground breaking product enhancements coming later
this year. So stay tuned, we believe 2009 will be our best yet!