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Church Management Software Choices

A very helpful resource for church ministry in our day is church management software. A shift has taken place in this field. It used to be that a church would purchase software that would be loaded onto the church’s computers. Now the best church management software is being offered as an online service that is paid for on an annual basis.

Recently our church decided to update our management software. With the onslaught of church management systems being developed within the last several years, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Our associate pastor (Cody Crigger) spent numerous hours of time researching various options. He narrowed it to three choices that he believes are some of the best on the market today. The following is a summary of these three options. Hopefully this will save you some time if you are looking to update your church management software. Each of these are web-based products requiring a yearly subscription typically billed quarterly. Also, each is based on average attendance for billing. 

ConnectionPower

Focuses highly on a process the company has developed for retaining visitors. Offers and pushes high accountability for follow-up with visitors. Designed its product with separate modules. Examples: PowerVisitor—focusing on retaining visitors; PowerMember—focusing on caring for members; PowerWeb—prefab website and event manager. ConnectionPower pretty much offers what comes to mind when you think of a church management system. Good product, but a little clunky. Learn more about Connection Power.

Church Community Builder

Much like ConnectionPower but has a cleaner look and focuses a little more on creating an environment for your people to connect with each other. Visit the Church Community Builder site and request a demo video.

The City

The City is church management software meets social networking. It focuses highly on connecting people via a Facebook-like page for each user while offering most of the administrative abilities of the two programs mentioned above. Check it out here.

7 Comments

  • Mike,

    What are you guys using? I am evaluating these three for our church plant (I think I have pretty much eliminated ConnectionPower). If you, or Cody, have any more feedback let me know. I would be especially interested if you are using The City.

    Scott

  • Nat Kealen says:

    I need to check these out. We’ve just been using an Excel spreadsheet, I believe.

  • Jonathan Norris says:

    At my last job I used a non-profit management software program and loved it’s usefulness! It definitely is a helpful tool to use for mining data you’ve collected. In the case of church management softwares the data you’re mining would be about visitors, finances/contributions, members, etc.

    Despite being unsure of the cost, I think Connection Power looks like a great program. The City has been available for a relatively short amount of time, as it was recently bought out from Mars Hill Church by Zondervan.

    My complaint with The City & Church Community Builder (or even Tangle (f.k.a. GodTube) for that matter) is that these “community builders” can be seen as glorified Facebooks that actually separate you from the community you’re trying to reach. The City’s own promotional video says that it’s not really church management software, its church “movement” software. If you’re looking for a good church management software I’d go with Connection Power (out of the 3 given). I wish someone out there would build a program that has the useful sides of these three programs that would work with existing applications such as Facebook.

  • Brian Luke says:

    hi – thanks for the write up.

    I look after marketing for The City and would like to respond to the last post made here …

    The City vs Facebook …
    There are many downsides to Facebook when using it for church communities. The fundamental DNA of Facebook is that it is about “me” and helping the individual broadcast themselves. The group functionality doesn’t allow any approximation of church organization structure, there are no tools for helping churches organize themselves, match needs to resources and many other aspects of church life that need to be facilitated. There is no access to the data that is embedded in group activities that may help the church understand group health. There is no geolocal-awareness to help people make connection with people from their church that live nearby. Most importantly, it is questionable whether content in groups really remains in those groups, so intimacy/trust is compromised. I could go on. Don’t get me wrong … we recommend to churches that they maintain a Facebook page … for outreach, not for enabling church community.

    The City vs ChMS
    The City is focused on community building. We are software for the WHOLE church, not just the admin office. We don’t like to be categorized as ChMS because we are so different. But because we have an underlying member database that is highly accurate we have been able to build in a number of ChMS features.

    If you’re looking for anything relating to social media or ChMS or a great communications tool, check us out.

  • Brian Luke says:

    Looks like our url wasn’t added to my post … http://www.onthecity.org

    thanks!!

  • Lee says:

    We made the switch to connection power. They were very helpful with the initial process for setup (migration).

    I should mention that the reason for our switch was because of the KIOSK system that they have. We already had a simple database in place, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to migrate because of the nice features available.

    However I have run into a problem with the KIOSK system. It does not run as expected (with our setup and the thumb reader). I opened a support ticket over 2 months ago. Nothing has been resolved. I was told that I would receive information, I didn’t. The documentation for setup is lacking, there are dead links all over the place, and ultimately the support fails.

    I don’t know what they’re doing over there, but they’re definitely not customer centric when it comes to support.

    If you don’t have any support issues, then this software may be fine. If you run into some sort of technical issue, then good luck getting it resolved.

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