Technology solutions are helpful to a church only as they help enable ministry and enhance stewardship. We provide strategic and process consulting to enable you to implement the best technology, software and tools, at the right time, in the most effective way, to serve others well and to meet the ministry goals God has placed before you.

CONSULTING

Enable Ministry Partners’ Consulting goes beyond the day-to-day support and management of technology systems to help you use those technology tools to enable your ministry vision and strategy. Our team has decades of church leadership experience in staff, lay leadership, and officer roles. We understand ministry people because we are ministry people. We combine that ministry focus with our experience in technology and business strategy to help you steward your resources more effectively and efficiently.

 

Our church mangement consulting team can provide strategic direction for:

• Church Management Software
• Related Software and Systems
• Accounting/Finance Software
• Facilities Management (HVAC, Lighting, etc.)
• Security (Door Access Controls, CCTV, etc.)
• Media (Audio/Video/Streaming)
• CIO and Strategic Planning Services
• Vendor Contract Management
• Long range technology roadmap planning
• Data Analytics and Decision Support
• Giving and Generosity
• People Engagement/Assimilation
• Community Demographics

Does it sometimes seem like your staff serves your church software more than your software serves you? Do you find it hard to keep and maintain accurate data and even harder to get useful information out of your systems? Do people spend hours or days each week copying data from one spreadsheet to another, just to get a report to a pastor? Do your members complain that signing up for an event or communicating with members of their small group is cumbersome?

 

Do you now seem to have multiple “church management” applications that really don’t work all that well together?  Do you have to repeatedly enter the same information into multiple systems and applications like the ones listed below?

• Email blast tools like MailChimp or Constant Contact
• Text-to-give applications
• Giving kiosks
• Volunteer signup like Planning Center Online or Signup.com
• Background check subscriptions
• Facilities scheduling software

 

It should be easier. And it can be. Church Management Software (ChMS) should free your people to do more ministry, not tie their hands with unwieldy administration.  When implemented well a ChMS should enable you to have more intentional relationships with the people you serve and less relationship overall with your database.

 

When we talk with churches who are weary of or challenged by their current church management solutions, the reasons for their struggles often include:

• Wrong software fit – Maybe your current software package was a great fit (or the best fit available) years ago when it was first installed. But since then, your church has probably changed. New people, new culture, and/or a new ministry philosophy can all change whether the software you currently use is still the best choice for you. Or maybe the software you currently use just hasn’t kept up with the times and there are better options available now that offer greater flexibility and capabilities.

 

• Incomplete or improper implementation – Sometimes the software you currently use can do everything you need it to do, but it isn’t set up or configured in the specific way that you need it to operate. Maybe new features have been added to the software but you aren’t taking advantage of them. Perhaps your ministry direction or emphasis has changed and things need to be rearranged a bit to make the software work the way you need it to work.

 

• Inadequate training for the staff – Chances are, the people involved in the original training session during implementation were trained a long time ago. Maybe they don’t still work at the church. And even if they do, they may not have kept up with training on new features and methods over years of software upgrades. For those that started after the initial training, they’ve often been trained on some specific tasks as their predecessor did a rapid fire two-day “brain dump” of their whole job before heading out the door.

 

We can help you identify ways in which your church management system can better serve you and how to go about realizing those improvements whether your challenges are based in training, configuration, or possibly, overall software fit. We also can supply Church Software Administrators who provide ongoing ChMS support as a service.  Our church software administrators combine deep knowledge of leading ChMS systems with the ability to apply the software’s capabilities to enable ministry by addressing your specific ministry and information needs.

Our software evaluation process starts with gaining a clear understanding of your vision. Through a combination of staff interviews, “whiteboarding” workshops and surveys, we will identify the strategic issues, bottlenecks or pain points of your current system and help you identify your individualized functional requirements. Functional requirements are more than a feature list. They are a profile of not only what your software needs to do, but how it needs to do it.  Your software needs to be able to help you work in the way you need to work; you should not have to adapt your process to the dictates of the software design.  Additionally, we will consider the technical requirements flowing from these functional requirements.  We will address with you questions around security, the technical platform utilized, the need to accommodate mobile staff and volunteers, etc.  From this initial requirement phase, we will create a Request for Proposal and guide your key team members through the vendor evaluation and selection process. Once you’ve decided on your best option, we can walk with you through the implementation and training steps as well.

RELATED SOFTWARE AND SYSTEMS CONSULTING

No Church Management Software package does everything. We can help you develop a strategy for those complementary applications that don’t necessarily fit into the Church Management category. The Church Management Software workshops often reveal opportunities to consolidate redundant systems, as well as opportunities needs to bring in additional systems to support specialized, unique ministries. We can help evaluate solutions for accounting, facilities management, security (door access controls, CCTV), resource scheduling, and media related systems. These areas now connect back to the network and many can integrate certain functions with other components. We will help you navigate the many options for partners and providers of these solutions.  This approach allows you to obtain a comprehensive and integrated view of all your related technology needs.