Saturday 29 July 2017

Why Integrating Your Website with Church Management Software is Considerable?

Are you working in a church? How did you come to know about it? 

Most people today use internet as the sole medium to investigate or hunt for places, as a consequence today even the smaller churches are building their online presence through websites to catch visitor’s eyes. The larger churches are operating through church management software along with a website as they know that software is not a big time saver but also an innovative way to get rid of all the painstaking tasks which are unfeasible to conduct manually. But not all of them have integrated their website to the online church management system.

If you are pondering over why the church website and ChMs should be linked to each other, here are some groundbreaking reasons-
  1. Easy To Update Your Online Calendar – Calendar is a crucial way to notify your members about the events such as cookouts, galas and retreats that would take place during the year. Updating your website every week can be hectic, but if your website is integrated with your online church management software, any event that you enter in your software will sync in the website reducing double entry. 
  2. Data Management – Once your church website and the ChMs are integrated; it will lead to better consistency. The donor would be able to see the endowment they made and use it for their tax statements. If the church management software is not integrated in the low-level, site’s administrators have to themselves change the address, phone numbers and other particulars they collected at the time of membership. By integration, people can log in and make changes to their details whenever they want.
  3. Monitor Events - If there is an event next week, most of the people would not remember it. It is important that you make them register themselves to the event; this will send an alert and notify them on the day it takes place. Through the church and charity management software you can know the groups which are interested in attending the event; therefore, send an invitation to only those selective people instead of flooding everyone who sign’s up.

The bottom line is that for a victorious journey a church needs to have two important elements – better integration of information and expanding the community. The website lets more people know about your church while the ChMs reduces your staff workload to almost half and helps to keep the records centralized; having an access to both will speed up your growth and lead to a better community spirit.

Church Management System – An Aid to Transform Visitors into Members

The biggest challenges the churches are facing today is turning their first time visitor into a member of their church community. Due to the different tasks performed in the church such as maintaining its own budget, charities and service of worship, often the church authorities are not able to focus fully on their hospitality process.

How will the church management system help in turning your initial visitors into new members?

Software being a solution to stick your initial visitors sounds absurd, but undeniably it is the best way to connect to your visitors, gathering their information and for conducting the further follow ups.

Effortless Online Calendar– You can notify your visitors about the services and schedules of the church. The ChMs have an online calendar that helps your visitors to know about the events and schedule. 

The church and charity management software have functionality to integrate the database and schedule of the visitors. Usually not all of the people who you send invitations will be attendees; therefore, there is a risk in display the information of the service schedules. But through many ChMs you can instantly edit the website, sync it with the database and provide the right information.

Follow-ups - What was the first time visitor’s experience at your church? Did he or she make a connection to the church? There are a lot of questions like these which can help the church have a deeper understanding of the visitor. Through follow-ups you can determine how they felt and also convince them to visit again. ChMS can perform follow up by -
  • Phone Call –The database you collected from the guest in the ChMs would aid you to call the visitors and thank them for coming; you can also tell them about the upcoming worship events to be organized in your church. Some church software have the capability to automatically place all your visitors into a queue and send them a follow-up call.
  • Emails /Text Messages – Majority of the church software development today have a functionality to send text messages to the attendees. The highly effective software lets your email account to be linked to the church website and send mails to the people about the events and services the church is performing and how it is playing a role in the betterment of the society. 
  • Information Gathering – You can speed up the assimilation process by knowing the people more closely and making them feel being the part of your church community on their first day.  Example – If you know the name of the visitor and address with name it will make them feel homely. Information will help you know about what makes them feel uncomfortable, do they agree to the ideas practiced in the church etc. 

With time churches have started using new technologies; church management software is one of the basic elements that churches need to keep a track of the members and visitors. These points mentioned above give some information on how the churches can convert their first time visitors into members.