Church Management Software – What’s the Point? Part 2

In my last article I talked about how in many churches information gets fragmented and spread all over staff and volunteers and how a centralized management software solution can help with this problem. This time let’s explore some other ways that a church management software solution can help your church and your ministry be more effective and also save you time and money!

Beyond keeping track of contact information a good church management software solution can also help you to centralize multiple other things. For example: your church master calendar, your financial accounting, your giving records, your donor records, your church small groups, your volunteers, and more!

JQuery Mobile Pros and Cons

Everyone has different experiences with technology, but I wanted to list my experiences with JQuery Mobile, the pro’s and con’s I've had to deal with. I have developed several mobile apps, on iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry and Windows, over the past year and in the process have tried a few different technologies to make my life easier. I've used the native language, PhoneGap with Sencha Touch, PhoneGap with JQuery Mobile and Titanium. Since my background is in .Net, PHP and JQuery, I naturally gravitated towards JQuery Mobile. However, in several projects I've had to work around some JQuery Mobile issues, with a bit of frustration along the way. Here are a few of the pain points I experienced:

Church Management Software – What’s the Point? Part 1

As a former church administrator of over 10 years, I am intimately familiar with the question: “What is the point of church management software”? Isn’t this an expense that our church, which is already on a shoestring budget, can do without? Quite possibly, but I’d like to take a few minutes and explore exactly why church management software can  help your church greatly and, in most cases, possibly end up saving your church valuable dollars.

I ‘ve worked at several church plants over the years and, as a church grows, the information required to adequately and effectively care for the congregation grows rapidly.  This can easily start to fragment and get lost.

How? The information ends up being stored in small pockets all over the place: your staff, your volunteers, and into multiple computers which may be at different locations (homes, offices, church buildings, etc.).  

Why nonprofits need to revisit their website strategy

Getting a website published is just the beginning. To raise visibility, you need to make sure the “word gets out” about your website and the cause. Some of the ways to do this are:

SocialNetworks– Establish a Facebook page for your cause, and get all the staff to participate on a regular basis. Encourage them to have an open, positive - but truthful - dialogue through the social media portals. This humanizes the nonprofit to your target audience, and gets buy-in to the passion underneath the cause.

YouTube– post videos that highlight the cause, with links to your website and other social media outlets, like Facebook. The more sites you link to your nonprofit’s website, the higher the traffic, and ranking among search engines (i.e. Google, Bing, etc.)