Do you know what these 2 things have in common? Not much, really, except for the fact that I get more hits for these 2 things than anything else.
Did you know if you type Happy Plastic People into Google, that this blog is the number one result? That is bizarre to me, what a strange thing to get picked up for.
If you want the study guide for Casting Crowns – Bible study, let me know, it’s a great study. A big thanks to Casting Crowns for including it in their CD jacket. All I have done is pulled the information out and put it into a pdf file and we used it for a small group study last year.
ChMS is another big topic that many people are interested in. Churches of all sizes need to take ChMS seriously, there are many great products out there. There are the well known names, such as ACS, Fellowship and others, but there are others that are lesser known, but perhaps better suited for smaller churches. I am on a quest right now to find some of the lesser known ChMS’s that are high quality and worthwhile and help make them more known. I’ve got several I need to take time to look at, thanks to those of you who have sent me information. Keep it coming.
Don’t miss my point here, there is nothing wrong with ACS or others, they are well worth the investment and will provide you with great tools to manage your church, but not all churches have the budget to put toward that. I want to find other applications that serve as a place to start, when money is an issue. There are applications that are worthy of being considered, that are geared toward smaller to mid-size churches. Of course, on the other hand, oftentimes, you get what you pay for.
I’m also working on a way to create a resource for churches to be able to find the best ChMS to meet their needs and cross reference them. I’ve got an idea and it’s one more thing that I need to devote some time to, but if when it comes together, it will be a nice resource.
Thought I’d chime in on this topic a little bit. I attended a church using Membership Plus for all of their needs. It’s relatively cheap and worked pretty well for them. ACS, Fellowship One, Shelby – they all have a place and I think each would even offer some price breaks to smaller churches. Their respective sales people can discuss that in more detail. I vaguely even remember an open-source ChMS project, but can’t say 100% on that. I will offer this advice to any church looking into ChMS systems – standardize on one system if at all possible. That means that if you decide to use Shelby for your Children’s Ministry and Main Worship services, don’t use Excel for Youth and Men’s Ministry in any old fashion. Sure it is sufficient for the day, but if you ever need a comprehensive report of everything going on in the church you’ll have a lot of work to make the reports accurate because John Smith in the Men’s Ministry is really the same as Johnny Smith working with the Youth, but not the same as Johnathon Smith working in Children’s Ministry.
I’d also throw in a word of caution about home-grown systems, especially for smaller churches. From what I’ve seen, these tend to work pretty well for a while, but then either the author leaves the church or is otherwise not able to maintain the custom solution and the church is left in a bad position as far as their personalized ChMS system is concerned. When you have a pretty decent sized staff and very committed volunteers, you can make this work. However, if it’s just one (or two) people volunteering, you might be better off with a scaled down version of any of the “off the shelf” ChMS systems. You’ll get a pretty good set of core functionality and most of these systems also provide interfaces one way or another for various accounting packages such as QuickBooks.
Looking forward to the listing of the various ChMS systems. That should be interesting. I know I’ve wondered before what is available and how much it costs to get started on the various systems.
Thanks for the interesting post.
-Pete Schott
I work for a church software company called Nspire software. I used this software long before I ever came to work in the church software industry; just incase you are thinking I just trying to advertise:) Using the software is what actually got me the job. I love Nspire… not just because I work for them, but because this software has heart. We made it for ministers by ministers and we understand what ministries need. Nspire doesn’t require a Phd to use or any advanced programming knowledge. We use it at the church I attend and love it. I would highly recommend for you take a look at us if you are looking for church software or are just intersted, you can go to http://www.nspiresoftware.com or if you want to see our blog go to http://www.insidenspire.com . If you are really interested give us a call (888-297-6495) and we will take you through an online demo or send you a trial copy, our software is worth taking a look at before making a decision to purchase… you might find yourself delightfully surprised.
I also want to make a note, that I agree with Peter. Home-grown system just do not work unless you have a tech staff. By this I mean a real tech staff and not just volunteers. Almost all churches we have spoken with that decided they wanted to go the home-grown way to save some money, ended up coming back to us later. This is just our experience.
Hope this helps add to this wonderful post, thanks to Jim for the Great topic,
-Brandon Gross
Great post Jim. There are so many lesser known solutions out there and too many churches only consider a few. Doing your homework to find all relevant solutions that can meet your needs before making a purchase can have a huge impact on the future of your church. The solution you choose is going to be with you for a while so make sure it has everything you need as well as room to grow if that is in your plans. There are over a hundred solutions out there, one of which might be the perfect fit given your specific needs.
Capterra has a comprehensive directory (link below) that lists a lot of the ChMS solutions out there. It’s up to 124 products now but it’s constantly changing as new vendor come up and others die out or merge. If you scroll down to the comprehensive section, you can contact any vendor by clicking on the envelope beside the vendor name. Hope this helps those doing their Church Management research.
http://www.capterra.com/church-management-software
-Jeff Pierce