Church Admin | CMS

Like it or not, every church needs some way to manage information and people. From the little neighborhood church with 25 in weekly attendance to the mega-church that sees 6,000 per weekend they all have the same basic need, keeping and protecting information. For a lot of churches a web based management system works well because it gives pastors and ministry leaders access to information from anywhere they have a web terminal. This falls right in line with the coming software trends in many industries and dimensions of life. Because this software option is the most functional for the church plants I will focus on the web based option. Also, I will not be making recommendations of one system over another because my experience is very biased. I will instead outline how Impact Church uses her system, Church Community Builder. Many of the things I illustrate will be applicable to other systems that are available such as Fellowship One and Connection Power.

Groups
The first and most important tool is the groups. This is the heartbeat behind every subdivision of people that we use. In Church Community Builder (CCB) the most basic collection of people is the Entire Church Group. From here you can email people, you can find contact info for them and you can see when they started attending. To further organize people you can create groups for anything. We use groups to produce nametags for Sunday morning, projects and for our iGroups or home groups. For our iGroups each group is named for the lead family and they are populated with the current attenders of those groups. The leader of these groups are given sufficient privileges to see the contact info for each person as well as their spiritual gifting as assessed by a shepherd or pastor. The leader can add or remove people to their group as well as see what events if any their people are registered for. They can see if there are any notes from a previous iGroup leader or shepherd or pastor regarding any aspect of that persons life. These options extend to our Jr. High and High School groups where the leaders can include information like school and grade. This is open ended since groups can be used for anything and are really the foundation for many of the higher level features of many of these systems.

Calendars & Events
In my experience calendars in the CMS are not very functional for general communication purposes. They typically don’t export to anything that real people use and often they are not very pretty. So, with that said I will be writing more about church calendars in the next issue of Church Admin. The calendars we use in CCB are strictly tied to events that occur in the context of its group. One example is the Murrieta Community Events group that we created this year. Impact Church is working to help City of Murrieta employees and event organizers create volunteer pools and participants. Since the city requires applications for volunteers we have a stack of them and often do recruiting on Sundays. As people fill out a form and we submit them to the city they get added to our CCB group Murrieta Community Events. This indicates to us that the individuals in that group are eligible for service in city events. The events are programmed into the Murrieta Community Events group calendar and when a group member volunteers for a specific event we register them in the system. This can be done by verbal confirmation or an email invitation can be sent with an option to RSVP. This simplifies the process of collecting volunteers for events and helps our pastors and administrative assistants keep track of who is registered for what. The same idea applies to any scheduled event that we are trying to make happen.

Assimilation
As a Star Trek fan this is a bad word to me, but its the best way to describe the process of someone visiting a church for the first time and taking them through the process of being a full time attender. CCB uses a great tool called Process Queues. These are completely customizable steps that can be assigned managers. Any church that has new visitors come along need to know who they are and have a measurable way to find out where they are in the courting process. At Impact Church we have a team of people that run our ‘Thanks for Coming’ ministry. This is basically assimilation and retention of visitors. It starts with a first time visitor that gives us their information for the first time and takes them through the process all the way to becoming part of an iGroup. Its an important component of shepherding people and can get quite cumbersome without the right tools. I will go into this topic in more detail in a later article.

Your church management system should also be able to track contributions, donors and tax records for those donors. I will not go into that here because this is a fundamental feature that can often be handled quite well by any single station software such as Logos. I would love to hear from you and find out how you are using any of these features of your CMS or if you would like to know in more detail how we are using ours.