I am new to FellowshipOne and currently am going through the implementation process. Although FellowshipOne is by far one of the best church management programs that I have seen, I was expecting a bit more sophistication than what I discovered. I just got off with my delivery manager and discovered that, although FellowshipOne routes potential contacts to the appropriate ministry leader, there is no task assigned to him. In fact, we would not know what the ministry leader did or suppose to do with the contact unless he were to mention that in the comment section.
The way FellowshipOne is currently setup is that each church should have their own ministry process(es) that each ministry leader should learn. The ministry leader should make the appropriate notation that would indicate what he has done, go over and change the status of the contact that would reflect where he is at in the process of discipleship, and then forward the person to the other ministry leader who would then be in charge of taking the contact to the next level of the discipleship process.
(Deep breath) That was a mouthful.
Maybe, I am a technologically spoiled brat, but should not all of these tasks be automated if F1's goal is indeed to give us more time for ministry? For churches like mine that has a defined discipleship process that leads people through spiritual maturity, we need something that will not provide us with a follow-up nightmare. I should be able to look up any given member and know exactly where he is in the discipleship process, who is leading him through that stage, how long he has been there, and what tasks need to be completed on the part of the ministry leader to bring that disciple through that stage.
Allow me to provide you with my bright idea (if it has not been offered yet). Somewhere in the church setup there should be an area where a list of consecutive events (where the completion of the former triggers the commencement of the latter) can be setup. To be overly simplistic, allow me to give a sample of three. Again, this is overly simplistic, because there should be more steps in between these. But let's name the events (1)Salvation, (2) Church Membership, (3) Servanthood. There should be a list of tasks (small or great) under each event that needs to be accomplished before the next event is triggered. The tasks can all be assigned to one person, or different tasks can be assigned to different people within the event. When the F1 Champion creates the task, he would program F1 to route each task to the appropriate person. Some tasks would require some prerequisite task to be completed. Others would be able to function independently. However, it is setup, once all the tasks within that event (or "stage") is completed, it would automatically trigger the next event with its respective tasks.
How would this look from the perspective of the ministry leader?
Well, like always, the ministry leader would logon into the F1 portal and look over at his "My Task". He would then click on his ministry category. From then on, instead of just having a list of people with no direction of what to do, he would then have the same list of people but with the list of tasks below them or, better yet, hyperlinked to the disciple. He can sort it by date, by person, by task, etc. and save his customization for each time after that. The result is that anyone in the pastoral staff can look at any member/contact in F1 and know exactly where they are in the discipleship process. This I would think, would fulfill the assimulation tunnel that F1 demonstrates in their corportate website.
Now, since it seems like I am under inspiration at the moment. I will offer you another enhancement idea: provide the ability to sync the tasks with Microsoft Outlook, and/or PDA device. Now that's savvy.
Although I am full of ideas, unfortunately, I do not have the slight capability to write the code for F1. Otherwise, I would. My DM stated that FellowshipOne is working on something like this. Is this true? Where are we at? And when should we anticipate it?
I predict that when and if F1comes out with such enhancements, that they would literally have sealed their ministry business to hold the monopoly of church management software, especially if they integrate their technology with Microsoft Office.
Can anyone give me some feeback?
God Bless,
God Bless
Yamil Luciano|Spanish Ministries |Oasis Baptist Church|Mark Neal, Pastor |702.451.5694. ext. 115| yamilluciano@oasisbaptistchurch.org| www.oasisbaptistchurch.org