Church Management Software (ChMS) Forum: Seraphim

H E L P I N G L E A D E R S B E C O M E B E T T E R S T E W A R D S .

Church Management Software (ChMS) Forum

Presented by:

Seraphim Software

CHURCH EXECUTIVE • C h M S F O R U M : S E R A P H I M S O F T WA R E2 churchexecutive.com

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Table of ContentsINVISIBLE TECHNOLOGY, TANGIBLE FELLOWSHIP 4Too often, we talk about tracking visitors and not letting them “fall through the cracks” of the organization. That’s the foundation of what a church management system (ChMS) should do — but it

can be lot richer.

By Sam Batterman

USING TECHNOLOGY TO TAME THE VOLUNTEER SCHEDULE HEADACHE 6Perhaps no other part of church is as important or as complicated as managing volunteers. Visitors coming to the church are greeted by volunteers — those first few impressionable moments are left to volunteers. The same is true for the nursery, our children’s ministries, guardian angels patrolling the parking lot, and especially the lay leaders that lead out bible studies, Sunday

school classes and children’s programs.

By Sam Batterman

ChMS: ASK “WHY?” BEFORE YOU BUY 7Changing a church management system (ChMS) is a big deal for a church of any size. Make sure you understand why you want your church to undergo this shift.

There are dozens of valid reasons for changing ChMS, but understand that political capital will be expended in making this change.

By Sam Batterman


Invisible technology, tangible fellowship

Too often, we talk about tracking visitors and not letting them “fall through the cracks” of the organization. That’s the foundation of what a church management system (ChMS) should do — but it can be lot richer.

In some cases, people will look at your church using a few characteristics of each of these roles — they aren’t always mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, catering to these needs and understanding this is key to attracting these people.

First, the basics Any system you use should be able to easily tell you where people

are coming from (geographically), and when they come (early service, later service — they might map strongly to contemporary or traditional services). These are relatively simple; the ultimate inquiry is why they are coming. Did someone invite them? Did they see a flyer? Did they visit your church website?

A simple example of this type of information is displayed below in our ChMS.


Focus on: First-Time Visitor Engagement

By Sam Batterman

People visiting your church tend to fall into a number of categories. The Bible talks about this:

• �Prophets care about the message and how the sermon is delivered. They care and evaluate what books are in the bookstore and how truth is discussed. Associations matter to these people.

• �Priests care about people. They look at how the church reaches out to the community, what activities it offers for children and teens, and how it reaches out to people such as single moms. These people want to “feel” what the church is like.

• �Kings care about processes and things. They look at how the church is organized. Did the audio booth goof up? Were there typos in the worship lyrics slide? What is the church using money for? What are its capital spending plans?

You shouldn’t have to do additional work to get this kind of information. It should be visible and accessible to anyone on staff. In this example, you can see where people travel from, the bias of gender (more females than males are visiting), and that most visitors live in in the city of Phoenixville. From this trend, we can see a recent uptick in visitors — as high as 30 last week.

Now the real work beginsCollecting initial information in the form of a contact card allows

you to get started, but don’t overlook other methods of getting great data. A safe check-in system (integrated with your ChMS) for protecting children is a fantastic place to get initial data. Most parents


Focus on: First-Time Visitor Engagement

Workflows let you break down the process of managing visitors (or any process) into manageable steps. Each person enters the workflow at the top and is progressed through the queue until he or she reaches completion or is manually removed. This adds a lot of quality assurance to the process and ensures no one is deserted.

Our ChMS program processes actions automatically as people progress from stage to stage: changing their membership status, adding people to groups, sending text messages to individuals to alert them of new people in the queue. It can even “chain” workflows together. In this case, when someone reaches the end of the process, he or she is automatically added to a process for dealing with “second-time attenders.”

Groups and workflows are great for tracking sporadic visitors; however, when people continue to come back, your ability to go deeper and meet their needs is where a system can really benefit you. To this end, our ChMS offers an “Engagement Model” feature — similar to workflows, but less rigorous. Rather than a linear methodology, they focus on a holistic approach.

Engagement models let you track by person, what steps he or she has achieved. Dates along with these steps give you a sense of speed of progression, or the last time a person made progress.

In the example (bottom, left), some of these items are weighted more heavily than others, contributing to a lifecycle diagram. In the same view, other measurements — such as attendance and small group involvement — are also visible. This is a much stronger way to track a visitor as he or she begins to commit to deeper purpose in the church.

These tools are great, and most of the time staff people or designated volunteers are driving this process. Ultimately, however, this process must turn into relationship — that is, people talking to people in real fellowship.

As a final example, please consider the following image.

On this map, we show members in blue and visitors in red. The proximity of each item is striking. In some cases, they are right across the street from each other!

Being able to provide this kind of data to small groups / life groups on a weekly basis (or even better, to enable group leaders to generate it when needed), is an example of a technology being used to assist the church in reaching out to visitors.

The technology should be invisible, but the visitors should feel the difference.

That’s the measure of success.

Sam Batterman is president and CTO of Seraphim Software www.seraphimsoftware.com in Collegeville, PA. After years of working for companies including Merck and Microsoft, Batterman and his team now enable churches with high-tech tools designed especially for them.

will gladly give information to understand that their children are safe, that their allergy and other medical information are known, and that only they can gain access to their children to take them home.

Building groups can allow us to do a number of important things. These groups should not require a huge amount of maintenance. Some systems — our own included — support dynamic characteristics, such as, “Get me the visitors in the last seven days.” Every week, this group automatically adjusts itself with the proper people. Taking people from groups to workflows will insure they’re being handled in a “process-oriented” way.

Any system you use should be able to easily tell you where people are coming from (geographically), and

when they come (early service, later service — they might map

strongly to contemporary or traditional services). These are relatively simple; the ultimate

inquiry is why they are coming.

www.seraphimsoftware.com


Using technology to tame the volunteer schedule headache

Servanthood. Perhaps no other word encapsulates what it means to be a Christian. Christ was a servant to His Father’s great plan of salvation. He chose to be a peasant instead of being born into opulence. He chose to be a servant to His creation, by dying for us on the cross. And Christ modeled how to be a servant to his disciples.

In our modern, rush-around world, we rarely use the term “servant” — it has all kinds of trappings that can cause confusion. We generally use the term “volunteer.” But, volunteerism is servanthood. It’s what Christ called us to do.

Perhaps no other part of church is as important or as complicated as managing volunteers. Visitors coming to the church are greeted by volunteers — those first few impressionable moments are left to volunteers. The same is true for the nursery, our children’s ministries, guardian angels patrolling the parking lot, and especially the lay leaders that lead out bible studies, Sunday school classes and children’s programs.

These critical roles in the church are bounded by a number of important concerns: Who has volunteered? Are they gifted in that way as a volunteer? (Just because you want to be a teacher, doesn’t make you a great teacher.) Have we checked their background — especially in regards to children’s ministry? Are we using them? How often do they serve? Are they burning out? What are their preferences in serving? Do they like to serve with their families? What rotation works best for them?

As a leader of volunteers, your concerns are more aggregated: How are my volunteers performing, and do they enjoy their roles? (Because if they don’t, they won’t volunteer much longer.) Do they have feedback that can make the position better, more efficient and more fulfilling?

Way beyond a spreadsheet Excel was simply not designed for the task of managing all this; there

are better technology solutions out there for churches to use. Seraphim Software provides an integrated ministry planner, linked

tightly to its directory, grouping and reporting. This tight integration lets you quickly build lists of people who are serving in a ministry or are interested in serving, qualify them for service, and schedule them for service.

This tool goes further by automatically inquiring about availability, finding substitutes quickly and easily, and managing scheduling conflicts.

Here are some areas in which Seraphim Ministry Planner can help you be more effective with volunteers:

Attracting. Seraphim provides methods for “advertising” the needs in the church. The people in the congregation see these needs and can volunteer for the specific ministry. The application then allows managers in the background to confirm proficiencies and qualifications, such as child CPR, child safety and various teaching preparation classes. This tool insures you have the right people with the right skills.

Managing. It then lets you take this large pool of people and break them down into teams of volunteers — people who work well together and have similar schedules. Building teams is easy and quick.


Focus on: Scheduling Tools

Seraphim Ministry Planner. The meat of this whole process is, of course, time: the calendar. Seraphim Ministry Planning consumes your whole screen and allows you to filter by ministries and date ranges. Assigning teams to time slots, handling substitutes and seeing conflicts are all visualized in an easy-to-understand way.

Informing and reminders. A huge part of managing volunteers is reminding them and getting their availability. Seraphim allows you to set up reminders and not worry about them. Reminders can be set to send emails to your volunteers for events at any arbitrary time in the future. For example, send reminders to all your children’s ministry people who are serving in the next 90 days. They can respond by clicking a simple link in the email as to whether or not they are able to serve. The feedback from these responses is immediately visualized in the calendar, showing you who won’t be able to make it.

You can also send “just reminders,” which don’t inquire about availability these emails can remind people that they are serving this coming weekend. You have full control over the header, footer, and even the automatically generated text regarding what role, what location and what time they are serving.

Reporting. You can’t get better if you can’t see how you are doing. Reporting is focused on getting the most out of your volunteers. We have simple dashboards that show utilization rates, how many people have signed up, and how many people you are using. This allows you to discover who is serving and their frequency of serving.

Why is this important? Because, in many churches it’s the same volunteers over and over again. And while their faithfulness can inspire and impress, it also leads to burn-out. Are you using everyone you can? Are you spreading out the load? What utilization metric would your pastor like to see, quarter to quarter? We make it easy to surface these numbers and manage your departments.

A final word on volunteers Make sure you touch base with them regularly. These are the people

in the trenches, doing the job week in and week out. They will likely see things that can be improved — better processes, more efficient ways of doing things. Listen to them. Capture these ideas, and show them you care. This will go a long way in keeping people happy in roles and moving the mission of the church forward.

Sam Batterman is president and CTO of Seraphim Software www.seraphimsoftware.com in Collegeville, PA. After years of working for companies including Merck and Microsoft, Batterman and his team now enable churches with high-tech tools designed especially for them.

By Sam Batterman

http://www.seraphimsoftware.com


ChMS: ask “Why?” before you buy

There are dozens of valid reasons for changing ChMS, but understand that political capital will be expended in making this change.

“We hate our system”Now, here’s a reason that’s not valid. This statement is probably more of an

indicator that the church has outgrown its software — or that the software was a poor match for the church in the first place, or that the information isn’t sufficient to achieve tasks in an efficient manner.

Watch out for this phrase, because you could actually replace an old system with a new system … and still hear this lament.

What a new system meansChurch management systems are three things: data, processes and

features. Sometimes, we mistakenly think of features as processes; rather, a feature is how something is done in a process. All church management systems track attendance in some way, but how that process is done can vary greatly.

When you’re considering a new system, it’s vitally important that you look at your internal processes in a new way. The new system is modeled in a different way than the old one. If you buy a new system and stick with the old ways, you might actually be hurting yourselves by not taking full advantage of the processes the new software were designed to “set free.”

List your features, build your stakeholdersDon’t go shopping without a list. It’s good advice for grocery shopping and

even better advice for looking at ChMS. Nearly every vendor will handle the basics; just make sure you have them

down in the priority order of your church. Here’s a quick list of the ChMS basics you need:

Membership — track items of importance for any person or organizationFamily units — flexible modeling of any family unit


Focus on: ChMS Selection

By Sam Batterman

Changing a church management system (ChMS) is a big deal for a church of any size. Make sure you understand why you want your church to undergo this shift.

Grouping — build and maintain collections of people (classes, bands, skills, etc.)

Events — create and maintain events for services, attendance and safe check-in

Attendance — track detailed or headcount attendance per eventSafe check-in — match up who dropped off children and who can pick

them upReporting — analytics and reporting of nearly anythingDonations — track donations and pledges and generate tax statements.

After the basics, things get a bit more nebulous. This is where you see the innovation, character and direction of different vendors.

Evaluate ChMS using your own church’s dataThe vendor should be able to show you what your church will look like

with the new software before you plunk down any cash. This is a critical point. Every system models family units, attendance and groups a little differently. Understanding how your existing data fits into their model is vital to success.

For example, if your church is large (more than 5,000 records), you need to understand how fast the processes operate on data of that scale. If your vendor won’t entertain this idea, run away.

During the evaluation, check out the usability of the software — not just how easy it is to perform common tasks, but how difficult is it to do the “impossible” tasks. How far can you stretch it before you have to resort to exporting files to other tools to accomplish your task?

Also consider migration — make sure you understand what’s “migratable” and what can’t be migrated. (And, don’t forget to ask about cost.)

Service, service, serviceCan you call and get someone on the phone? Can you email? How quickly

does the vendor respond? Does it even know who you are? Is it reaching out to you proactively?

The most common complaint about ChMS vendors is that the service stinks. Understand what you’re buying in to: a roadmap and a long-term relationship. So, make sure you ask about a vendor’s development roadmap. Can you impact that roadmap with your ideas? Will the vendor listen to you? How fast is the vendor releasing?

Finally, talk to the vendor’s leadership. Who are they? Do they understand churches? Is this an obsession for them, or just a hobby?

Your infrastructureAre you thinking about buying a cloud-based system with a lousy

wireless internet service? Make sure you invest in the infrastructure to make the purchase successful.

Are you buying new software, but using 10-year-old check-in equipment? Think about the impedance of the hardware and software you’re combining.

Making the right ChMS decision can help you care for your congregants like never before, schedule volunteers with ease, track new visitors, and grow the church. It’s an important choice, so make the best one you can.

Sam Batterman is president and CTO of Seraphim Software in Collegeville, PA. [ www.seraphimsoftware.com ] After years of working for companies including Merck and Microsoft, Batterman and his team now enable churches with high-tech tools designed especially for them. Come see Seraphim at WFX 2015 in Nashville.

www.seraphimsoftware.com

Church Management Software (ChMS) Forum: Seraphim

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