Church Management Software Systems

When looking for a solution to manage your members, there are a lot of things to track and stay on top of.  Here are the kind of features you could find in a church membership software features ... (Items that are a hyperlink popup a window to provide more information about that topic-coming)

• Membership / Congregation Management - Keep track of your members and the key information about each of them to help you serve their needs and lead them.  You can even add pictures to their records. 

• Membership Directory - Once you've added your members to the system you'll be able to print out a Membership Directory.  Print them as individual people or by families.  You can choose to include their picture or not with their information.

• Track Tithes & Contributions - This is a feature that makes this area much easier.

• Track Pledges - Staying on top of pledges can be a huge job!  This is a feature that handles this process.

• Visitor Management - Stay on top of visitations and compel visitors to continue coming back.  Know who's a visitor and have the tools to create the best process to turn visitors into members.

• Counseling - Who's being counseled, by who, for what reason on what date & time.

• Track Attendance - Know who's coming and when they're coming to the church services, Sunday school and more.  Know if they've missed a few services so you can pro-active to follow up with them to make sure everything is okay with them.

• Groups & Committees - Which ones do your members belong too?  When did they start?  If they're on a committee, how much longer will they be assigned to that committee?  Know who's part of a group, who's the leader along with the leaders contact information, and much more.

• Prayer Requests - Who needs special prayers?  Where the prayers answered?  Know the prayers needed in your church.

• Growth or Marketing - This is the process of building your church by increasing your members.

• Handling inbound phone calls - Handling inbound phone calls. 

• Mass Mailings - This feature allows the user to send letter that pulls in information from each of the records it's being sent too.  For example, each letter being individually addressed ... Dear Bob, Dear Jim, etc.  This could include labels and envelopes.  You choose the records to be included and print away.

• Broadcast Emails - This is very much like the Mass Mailings feature, but this feature works with email instead of letters.

What's interesting about all of these different area's a church could choose to automate is you can purchase any of these features in individual single purpose database programs.  If you only need one of these and that's all you'll ever need, that would be fine.  But about the time you need more than one of these features it's best to get a church management software (CMS) system that offers those features under one system.  Why?

Because you don't want to do any double entry!  You want all of your members in one program and for that one program to offer the features you need.  That way you're only putting members in once.  Believe me, it's costly and time consuming to bounce from program to program and be forced to update more than one program when you have a membership change, or to add a new member to more than one program.  

Church Management Software:

In this area you're staying on top of or tracking items that have nothing to do with members.  Running a church is more than just members.  It's also ...

• Faculty and Staff Management - Who they are and what they do.

• Facility Scheduling - For weddings, funerals, card games or any other reason you'd allow others to use your church and facility.  This could include rental costs.

• Pastor(s) Scheduling - Know where the Pastor is, print the weekly or monthly schedule for the Pastor(s), and much more!

• Events - This could be church events.  This goes beyond the Facility Scheduling and Pastor Scheduling.  This is all events for the church.

• Sermon Management - Know what sermon you gave when.  You can even attach the sermon document for future referencing.  By doing this, you can search for past sermon's by keywords, topics or even the file name.

• Manage & Track Books in your Library - A lot of churches have a library where they either check out books to their members.  This would manage this area.

• Manage Books and Other Items You Sell - A number of churches also have a bookstore where they sell items.  For this purpose we suggest a POS (Point of Sales) system.  We are not aware of any that are integrated with a CMS.

• Manage Your Music - Churches need to manage their music and royalties.

• Manage & Track Church Equipment - As a church you also have equipment like vehicles, computers, projectors, etc that you need to manage ... what you have, where are they located, have they been loaned out, etc.

• Outreach - A church could have Outreach programs which need managed and tracked.

As you can see, there's a lot to managing a church.  The trick is finding the right system to help you automate your church.