My Church, MyCentral (part 1)
Monday, July 3, 2006, 02:41 PM - General
We’ve been planning our next generation church portal for some time now. Since this portal is to be fully integrated into our ChMS system, we had to put this project on hold until we determined which church management system we were going to change to. With recent vendor developments which are still undisclosed, I can finally say we’ve decided to stick with our current vendor and use any new, upcoming offerings they may soon have.In the beginning static web sites were fine. Dynamic web sites were a good step in the right direction, but live, personal web content is where it’s at. Can a member of your church find out what their personal next step is? Can they see their recent prayer requests, or the events, classes and training they are registered for? Can they see what their ministry leader is trying to tell their whole team about the upcoming weekend?
(larger view)
There were several goals of the system including:
• eliminating “information carpet bombing” (ICB) a.k.a. tell everyone about everything
• get personal – tell them things that are specific to their needs and desires
• get functional – let it be an essential tool in their hands
One of the problems we’ve had with our weekly bulletin insert is “space”. Since the space is limited, some ministries have not been able to publish information to those that may want to know. That is not good. Frankly, it’s unacceptable but in a large church I fear this can become the practice. Although a web page does not have this problem, the ICB problem must not get bigger.
Today, there is a flurry of information exchange between our “servant ministers” (you probably call them volunteers) and our ministry or staff leaders about upcoming events and serving schedules. While this has worked somewhat using email, there are still too many times where someone’s email inbox got the best of them and they were misinformed about when they were scheduled to serve. With the right tool in the hands of the leaders and servant ministers this problem greatly reduced.
How many of your tech savvy small group leaders are using Yahoo Groups to manage their group? Wouldn’t it be better for a person to “see” their group in your church’s portal? A tool that will let them see each others birthdates, anniversaries and such will help them to keep track of these important dates.
In the next part, I’ll review some of the functionality of each module in more detail.
Comments
