Though the ChMS (church management software) market is small, comparing the solutions available can take some time. If you are looking for a comparison chart of features, take a look at the following:

1. Nick Nicholaou with Ministry Business Services, Inc. publishes an annual comparison chart. (34 Solutions Compared; Date: 11/13/2009 )
2. Christian Computing Magazine: Note original chart appears to be no longer available, but this cached version is preserved on Digital @ Leadership Network’s blog. (27 Solutions Compared; Date: 12/15/2008)
3. CCIS publishes a comparison guide between its software and other ChMS providers. Though biased, it may give you some insight by looking at each of their comparisons together. (10 Solutions Compared; Date: Unknown)
4. Capterra doesn’t provide a comparison chart per se, but they do have a directory of ChMS solutions that can be filtered based on platform, features, and other criteria. It is a great tool to narrow down solutions based on your specific needs. (180 Solutions Listed; Date: Unknown).

Here are some of my recommendations before you start shopping:

1. Ask someone from senior leadership to sponsor the project…ensuring buy in from the very top and preparing the way for maximum involvement of all church staff.
2. Meet with key staff from every department/ministry and document their ‘business processes‘. Invest in a LiveScribe Pulse smart pen to capture both your notes and the audio of your meetings (you won’t regret it!). Keep a separate list for (1) reports, (2) processes that are inefficient and need to change, (3) issues or decisions requiring resolution or approval from senior leadership. (Here is a sample doc to provide staff in prep for your meetings).
3. Compile your notes into one master document, organized by department and then by task.
4. Have each department review their section to ensure that you documented their processes and needs accurately.
5. Recruit the legitimizers within your church staff to assist you with product selection.
6. Begin shopping, pick your top 2 solutions and get very thorough demos….evaluating each product based on how well it will accomplish the needs of your staff. Keep in mind, everyone will say, “Yes, our software does that!” However, the real question is how efficient does their software handle your needs (i.e. one step or ten?).
7. As you meet with each vendor, make a list of gap items…items that the software does not handle.
8. Weigh your options carefully and involve both senior leadership and key legitimizers in the final decision.

1. Technology is Not Always the Answer
Many times, I encounter those that believe if we purchase or develop software that it will make everyone’s life better. Bill Gates once said, “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”  Gates is right. Sometimes a reordering and combining of steps will result in great efficiency gains. Before throwing technology at a problem, scrutinize the processes first and reevaluate them regularly as the organization changes and grows.

By the way, a computerized child check-in solution is a great example. Every solution providers touts that its check-in system improves the security of your facility. I laugh when I read this…because the security of your facility is not in its technology, but in its processes. By processes, I mean those steps that you require to check-in children, whether by paper or by computer. If computerized check-in increases the security of your facility it is because your processes have changed, not because it is computerized.

2. Don’t Get Wooed by the Wow
We all get a case of gadget envy from time to time, but if technology decisions are driven by the ‘wow’ factor, your church will pay greatly for it. Good technology decisions should not be driven by what other churches have, but by the specific needs of your church. Diverting time and money to create an iPhone App when you need a new ChMS may not be a wise choice.

3. Don’t Take a Trinitarian View of the Project Triangle
Fully Featured, Cheap and Quick cannot coexist in one project. If a senior pastor or IT leader wants a project and its team to succeed, they should choose two and provide executive sponsorship for the project…ensuring buy-in from all levels of staff.

4. Standardizing Hardware and Software is Good Stewardship
Standardization of hardware allows for quick replacement or substitution of failed hardware. It also provides predictability and stability for how specific software will perform. Likewise, standardization of software reduces training costs and compatibility of files shared among staff. By standardizing on both, churches are able to leverage greater discounts though bulk purchasing. All of these reasons are why donated computer equipment can actually cost the church more money.

5. Standardizing Ministry Processes is Good Leadership
Ministry processes is the church equivalent to business processes. A ministry process is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service for a particular member or prospect. It often can be visualized with a flowchart as a sequence of activities. Examples of a ministry process would include: follow-up with a church prospect, staff’s response to an emergency hospitalization, process for joining the church. I have known many churches who have not defined these processes. As a result, new church employees are inadequately trained for their job and usually change the process to fit their skills or personality. In the case of a multi-site church, this problem is made much worse when each location’s processes don’t mirror each other.  Inconsistent processes result in inconsistent reporting, data quality, and inadequate use of the technologies the church has invested in.

A few weeks ago at the national meeting of the Church IT Roundtable at Saddleback, Rick Warren made the following statement, “The purpose of technology is to make the church more personal.” He is right, that is indeed one of the purposes of technology in the church. Unfortunately, churches often misuse the technology they have or fail to use it altogether. Here are a few technologies, most of which we have used at Second Baptist Church, that can enhance and preserve the personal and pastoral care of a large church:

1. Prayer Pagers: We have a supply of prayer pagers for those in the midst of a health crisis. We publish the names and the numbers of the pagers on our church intranet and our church website. One of our first recipients of a prayer pager, Rebekah Tauber, received such a following that the chain emails detailing her situation became an urban legend and earned an entry on snopes.com. Her prayer pager was a highly personalized reminder that people were praying for her. The pagers we use are through USA Mobility.
2. Social Security Death Index: We occasionally receive late death notices of church members or regular attenders. As part of our pastoral care, our senior pastor sends personal letters to family members on the 1 year anniversary of the loss of their loved one. It is important that we have correct information if it was not included in the death notice to the church. To verify our church records, we have used the Social Security Administration’s death index. If you need to verify a large number of records, I recommend CDYNE who provides a tool to search against a list of names. Otherwise, Ancestry.com underwrites the cost of a free search tool for single searches at RootsWeb.com. It is impressive how much information is returned in this simple search tool.
3. Task Centre by Orbis Software: Task Centre is a great 3rd party tool to use with any ChMS that monitors changes in your database and kicks off any defined stored procedure, task, or notification. Using this tool, you can setup email or SMS reminders to staff at the anniversary date of a birth or  loss in your church family, or a follow-up notification after a church member has not attended after a certain number of weeks, or schedule a weekly hospitalization report to be auto-generated and sent to your senior leadership. For us, it has been a very valuable tool!
4. Google Voice: Before you setup a designated prayer line, consider using Google Voice to give you even greater flexibility in managing calls for prayer. With Google Voice, you can have your prayer line ring several phone numbers concurrently ensuring that you don’t miss a call. You can also have the voice mails transcribed and sent to you by email or text. You can even forward calls on a schedule…allowing calls at night or on weekends to be routed to an alternate number.
5. Care Calendar: CareCalendar is a web based system to organize meals and other help for families during a time of illness or life changing event, such as the birth of a baby or death of a family member. Although it is cannot be integrated with your church’s membership database, it is still very much a worthwhile tool to recommend to your church family.
6. Caring Bridge: CaringBridge.org provides free websites that connect family and friends during a serious health event, care and recovery. It is similar to a blog but more defined in function and easier to use for the non-technical. There are other sites similar to Caring Bridge such as CareFlash and CarePages. Each of these organizations are very open to creating a branded account with your church as a service to your church members. I have not seen a comparison chart for these, so do your homework before deciding on the preferred provider for your church family.
7. The Funeral Negotiator: This isn’t a necessarily a technology or a software, but a great online resource. As a pastor, I have used the funeral negotiator before and he is the real deal. If you have someone in your church family that is overwhelmed with funeral costs (and who isn’t??), then I definitely recommend they contact the Funeral negotiator. He will save a grieving family a lot of money.
8. iPrayerWorks: iPrayerWorks.com is a hosted prayer management software that helps track and disseminate prayer requests, hospitalizations, and homebounds. It is a very much needed software and is one of very few that even exist.
9. Prepare-Enrich Marriage Preparation: Prepare-Enrich is a marriage prep program that includes an online couple assessment. Pastors can login to retrieve the assessment scores and access any number of relationship building exercises to include in the marriage preparation process. We have used this tool as a part of our Marriage Prep ministry for several years. While it is not a Bible based or Christian based tool, it is a very valuable tool and can be used well when facilitated by a pastor.
10. Legacy.com: Legacy.com provides tools for families to create websites in memory of lost loved ones. It also provides a service to post obituaries with an optional guest book for people to sign. It does cost money and probably could be just as easily accomplished through a free blog software, but I thought it worthy of mention.

Several years ago, I posted about the tension between policies and people. Two years later, the balancing act remains. Policies and standards are set to control costs and to maximize efficiency in the technical support of an organization. However, in reality there are always exceptions and one size doesn’t fit all. Some IT professionals I know are bent towards policies and as a result they rule with a heavy hand. They are rules driven, black and white, and often misunderstand the consequences of their own rules on the mission of the organization. There is often a disconnect between senior leadership and IT staff. However, as IT professionals, we want to empower our pastors and staff. We exist to support them in being efficient and effective in the ministry of the church. So how do we maintain the balance? Here are a few principles to keep in mind:

1. Rules without a Relationship Leads to Rebellion- If you have rules or policies, but little relational investment in the people you support, you are headed for trouble. Develop relationships with the people you serve. Befriend them. In those relationships, you will have a better understanding of their needs and goals. This helps you be proactive and find solutions for problems before they are even communicated to you or your team. Once you have built up a few ‘wins’, you can then afford to take a relational hit when you have to stand by your rules.
2. No is Never the First Response- Buy time and find alternative solutions if you are unable to accommodate one’s request or need.
3. Error on the Side of Empowerment- Wow! The corporate world would say just the opposite. But this is the difference between a corporation and a church. When you are confronted with an issue that poses equal amount of liabilities with the benefits of empowerment. Go with empowerment. God will bless it. If you discover later that you made a bad decision, then look at it as an opportunity to establish and educate the need for boundaries and policies.
4. Accept Exceptions – It in inevitable, but make sure you can explain why. Here are some of the reasons for exceptions that I have used: staff position (executive staff, etc.), training (has a person been trained), job descriptions, employment status (full time, part time, contract, etc).
5. In Person not InBox – If policies and people are at odds, deal with it in person. Don’t use email! Remember, you’re about relationships not rules.

After looking at several social media policies of other organizations, we finally drafted a social media policy for our church staff. The purpose of this policy is to give our staff some best practices in their personal use of social media during their employment at Second Baptist Church, Houston. For the reasons I referenced in my earlier blog post, this policy will not only empower our staff to use social media well, but also protect the church.

Second Baptist’s Social Media Policy – DOC | PDF

If you are developing a social media policy for your church or organization, be sure and check out SocialMediaGovernance.com which has an online library of 100+ social media policies from various companies and non-profits. Of all of the policies I reviewed, Kodak’s policy was extremely helpful…the best one I have found to date.

Recently, our church added a FREE job posting web service to our website that we call “Career Connections.” The purpose is to connect businesses with qualified job candidates within our church family. Employers may post job openings, search resumes, and view applicants. Job seekers may post resumes and search for job openings in the Houston area.

If your church has not done something like this, let me highly encourage it. We found a great partner in Tim Krauss at NeedsMet. NeedMet is a customized web application that connects employers and job seekers inside your church. It is a valuable tool to help church members find meaningful employment, connect church employers with job seekers, and help churches reduce unemployment.

They did a great job customizing our instance of their software to match our website (see before and after). They also back filled our account with job openings from Houston area companies…giving our church family immediate opportunities to pursue. I highly recommend them. Best of all, they are priced right for churches and deliver a great product in a short amount of time.

This fall, Second Baptist Church (Woodway Campus), Houston, TX will host a regional gathering of Church IT professionals called the CITRT (Church IT Roundtable). This gathering is more an unconference or a barcamp rather than a conference. So if you are in the Texas and Lousiana areas, come join us Sunday evening, November 1 and all day Monday, November 2.

More details to come, but in the interim read more about how we faciliate the Church IT Roundtable.

Next month will mark our 10 year anniversary as a multi-site church. We started our second campus in the fall of 1999. In 2003, we merged with an existing church and in 2006 we launched 2 additional campuses in movie theaters here in town. Today, we have 5 campuses and 1100+ staff. In 2002, I moved into my current role as Director of IT and Websites. Over the last 8 years, I have experienced the blessing of growing pains….especially as it relates to the multi-site model.

One of the interesting dynamics of being multi-site is how to manage 5 different campuses but yet retain the oneness and unity of the church, staff, and its congregation. I have seen some multi-site churches manage each location as its own free standing self governing church. Decision making, programming, infrastructure, etc are all localized to that specific location. I call this the localized model. I have seen other churches that govern all of its campuses, programming, etc. from a central campus. I call this model the centralized model. Then there is everything in between. As our church has grown and has moved from point to point between the two extremes, here is what I believe are some best practices when it comes to multi-site operations:

1.  Deploy the same model of church growth at each location. Most models differ in their method of assimilation and discipleship. Some use home groups and other use the traditional Sunday School model. Whatever your church does best, I recommend you do it at all locations.

2.  Centralize the operations. Of course, there are exceptions, but for the most part I have seen that support functions like IT, Communications/Marketing, Accounting, Security, Church Records (a separate department in our church), Facilities, HVAC, and Shipping/Receiving (if locations are within close proximity) are best managed from a central location or more importantly by a single staff team. This provides the following benefits:

• Centralizes purchasing and leverage greater buying power. For example, all technology purchases are made by IT. All furniture and capital expenditures are coordinated by Facilities.
• Standardizes processes and workflows thus allowing for more cost efficient deployment of technologies. Localizing technology initiatives results in Burger King technologies (‘have it your way’) which will kill your budget and frustrate your staff.
• Maximizes staff utilization.

3.  Localize the programming. By programming, I mean specific ministries and events. More than likely each campus serves a specific demographic and not necessarily the same as those of the other campuses. As a result, programming is best coordinated by the campus staff rather than a more removed centralized staff. On occasions, a multi-site event with other campuses helps build oneness and unity across all campuses, but for the most part each campus should handle its own programming.

4.  Develop clear and consistent branding across all locations. In a multi-site church, there is plenty of opportunity to give everything its own logo, website, printed piece, etc. Before long you have more noise than voice. Not all ministries are created equally and practically speaking there is usually not enough resources to support multiple websites, branding and rebranding for each individual department or ministry, etc. It may be fine to a point, but this practice does not scale as a church grows larger.

Personally, I am a proponent of a single website for a multi-site church, organized by campus with specific attention to its respective audiences. I believe Second’s website does this very well (of course I am biased). Second’s website is organized by campus but within each campus the design changes for three different audiences: adults, students, and children.

5.  Establish a clear and singular chain of command. Don’t place staff under both a localized supervisor such as a campus pastor or campus administrator AND a centralized supervisor. For example, it does not work well if a worship staff person answers to both a campus administrator for day to day responsibilities AND to a centralized supervisor who oversees worship for all locations. If the two supervisors don’t agree or work together well….you have a wishbone affect. Guess who is the wishbone?

These are just a few of the lessons learned in my experiences at a multi-site church. It is interesting to talk with friends who work with multi-national corporations and listen to how those organizations handle the balance between global and local entities. According to one close friend who works with the 5^th largest energy company in the world, the trend is moving towards more globalization of operations rather than localization….where decisions, standards, and technologies are being made at a very high level rather than at a national of localized level within the company. Will churches follow suit? Time will tell, but the tensions between the ‘one church’ and ‘multiple locations’ is very real for many. What leadership and operational trends are you seeing in multi-site churches?

Both the church and technology are ever changing. Churches have to work strategically to maximize its staff, resources, and work processes; otherwise, they'll likely experience duplication of effort, inefficiency, excessive expenditures. This is more true with IT, Communications and Media than any other area of the church. These 3 areas are technologically driven and technologically dependent. Churches can't afford to operate inefficiently because of the high cost of technology. The three diagrams below show the overlap that often occurs between these 3 entities. The overlap may vary based on the size and complexity of the church, but as a church grows these areas of overlap are real issues. It is obvious these 3 areas must work together in unison for a church to be strategic and effective in its use of technology.

The Shared Ministry (Functions) of IT, Communications, and Media

The Shared Technical Resources of IT, Communications and Media

The Shared Staffing of IT, Communications, and Media

As you can see, when these three aren't working together, you will find the following issues:

A. Decentralized Purchasing and Reduced Purchasing Power with Vendors.

B. Employing redundant personnel.

C. Defining redundant working processes.

D. Wasted time getting department heads to agree on priorities, projects, and availability of resources to get things done.

Conclusions:

1. Establish 1 person (the Triad Team Leader) to oversee all 3 department who shares a seat 'at the table' with the senior leadership/pastors of the church. This person needs to have both a heart for ministry, a technical bent, and a very defined vision for how technologies may be used strategically for the church.

2. Appoint a team leader for each of these 3 teams and define a clear chain of command.

3. Each week the Triad leaders meet to share project updates, weekly tasks, and reevaluate project priorities.

3. Locate (i.e. office) all personnel from these 3 departments into one central location to streamline internal communications, project collaboration, creative teamwork, etc. It helps to have a really good conference room.

WOW!!! Since November 1, our email filter caught 484,879 emails because of spam, viruses, malware, etc. This is 81.89% of all inbound emails to our church staff. What would we do without it!!!