Church Management Software

Posted on April 12, 2005

For those that have been around for awhile, you probably remember me spending some time evaluating CMS. (CMS = church management software. I have also discovered that CMS=content management software and that is a entirely different thing. It may be worth exploring as well)

To recap, my church began evaluating church management software several months ago since our needs are growing we desire more functionality. I spent a great deal of time researching different packages and narrowed it down to ACS and Fellowship Technologies. On the surface, both packages appear comparable. I had a list of functionality that we desired and these 2 packages met the needs we have.

We received demos from both companies and the reality is that Fellowship is by far, the superior package. ACS is fine for what it is but once you experience Fellowship, everything else pales in comparison. I cannot emphasize this enough, you don’t get it until you look at everything out there and hit them against your short list of ‘must have’ features, dropping off the ones that are lacking, even in a minor way. Once I got down to 3 or 4, the scrutiny increased and as I said, on the surface, these top 2 contenders appeared comparable.

In your situation, in your church, your desired functionality is different than mine, so your top contenders may end up being slightly different. However, I bet you a dollar(not really), but I can almost guarantee you that in the end, Fellowship is going to do everything you are looking for and probably do it better than you ever expected.

The reason is that this application was designed by a church (Fellowship Church), for themselves, to meet their own needs. The by-product is that they have a superior application to sell to you and I.

With that being said, don’t forget that you get what you pay for. This superiority comes with a price. Some might say they are mighty proud of what they are trying to sell, but it has more to do with realizing they have a superior product and charging appropriately for it, in my opinion. Churches are literally waiting in line to get on board, last I knew they had a few month wait to bring new churches on.

If your church is considering a new solution for church management software, I would encourage you to go check them out. The features are too numerous to list here.

For my church, we are very much sold on Fellowship, but we are working out a solid long term plan and will ramp up slowly. For us, it’s better to be more cautious and have a long term plan in place than to just settle for any other solution, that is probably ultimately not that much better than what we currently have.

By the way, one of the very top priorities for us is secure child check-in and Fellowship absolutely rocks in this area. It is by far the simplest and quickest and most secure solution available. I happened to be at Grainger Community Church the night they went live with Fellowship’s child check-in and watched briefly from a distance and it was extremely smooth, even on day 1. Granted, credit for the successful rollout also has a lot to do with the preparation of the church staff, leading up to go-live. Check out Jason’s blog, he discusses Easter Sunday and child check-in. He also discusses it other places thruout his blog. He is Director of IT at GCC, by the way.

On a final note, if you are considering CMS, do thorough research and know what you are buying. DO NOT spend much money at all for any software package that uses MS Access as a backend database. This is strictly my opinion, but that is not the database a church needs to store critical data such as member names, addresses, even financials. If they are not up front about what kind of back end their product has, I would assume the worst. If they were proud of it, they would tell you. Access is not stable, not secure at all, and is not scalable. To give myself a little creditbility in this area, I have done a ton of Access programming and I have spent alot of time writing code in Access in a way that makes it as stable as possible, but I can’t stop the bloating that this database does with regular use, all I can do is provide a means to correct this but it requires the user to take action regularly. I also really can’t make it secure.

I have looked at a couple of these packages with Access driving them and some are ok but others are a pitiful excuse for being professional.

I have actually developed an Access database for a church in the past to track visitors, it was fairly simple and easy to use. I think I still have a copy of it too, now that I think about it. I would give that away, if someone wanted it before I would recommend anyone buying a professional application based on Access.

That’s my $0.02 (where did the cents key go, anyway?) and I have probably offended someone but hey, you can’t make everyone happy. Access has it’s place but for a growing church, that is not the place for it. Fellowship rules!!

If you actually finished reading this, I would love to hear your opinion or thoughts.”

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