I guess you could call this the case for modern customer service but I call it the 20th century. There is an awful lot you can do as a church to meet each others needs in a one-on-one way but it takes those "pesky" welcoming, caring and knowledgeable people to do so. Unfortunately those welcoming people tend to usually be at least as busy as we are and things can fall through the cracks.
So that is where technology should meet process and limit the loss of information, enable communication and strengthen relationships in the process. Contact management with sales lead processing, pipelining and forecasting is a pretty well practiced science in a lot of big businesses. There are a number of good tools out there some that reside on one PC, a local network of computers or served on the internet. Some are web enabled letting anyone with the proper security credentials log-in while others require specialized software to access. Some automate multi-step processes while others simply are task lists. Some embrace the move to mobile access to data while some can't even synch with a PDA, let alone a cell phone. A lot of the software is frozen code that is seldom patched while some can be customized and updated in seconds.
From Salesforce.com to SAP to Act to Outlook -- there are a number of options for contact management and sales management. Then there are "vertical" applications for solving business needs for specific industries or solving business problems for certain roles. There are a very large and diverse set of software some commercial and a few open source that serve as Church Management Systems (ChMS). The quality and feature set is diverse as is the market they are targeting from small to giga-churches.
Many of the solutions are modular but the needs we are considering most now are in Contact Management, Data Management and Business Automation. Donation management is a nice feature as it can help track the involvement on that level and show warning signs. Group, Volunteer and Event management are in the next tier for us with Facilities Management an Check-In/Out being last. Separately some providers have Content Management Systems (CMS) to help delegate and manage portions or all of a churches web site. Some light CMS can be done in blog software or third-party apps. The positive of integration is one user name/password/permission set. Another feature in some software is the addition of online communities - some are a inelegant mix of freeware and others have a minimal feature set. For online communication and marketing it may be best to look for a CMS that supports automatically posting information out / syndicating to Facebook and Twitter vs. expecting that a ChMS will move to solve that problem over time.
So what are the things I think an ideal modern church needs:
0) Web based interface to allow remote access
1) Mobile access via iPhone / Droid or at least Synch of significant chunks of contact data
2) Capture and track attendees (visitors, attendees and members) including sourcing & scraping from emails
3) Contact information and preferences for everyone in the system
4) Self service so that members can log-in and update personal information
5) Ability to track and document all communication with an individual and household
6) Ability to have private fields or notes whose access is limited
7) Ability to have custom forms with custom fields and reporting on those to track unique data
8) Ability to mail merge both emails and letters & post cards saving and sharing templates
9) Ability to send email campaigns and track receipt, open and response
10) Inclusion of an RSVP/Reg button as well as Send to a Friend capture contact in campaign email
11) Texting gateway to send texts directly or through 3rd party provider
12) Integration with Voice mail gateway to send out pre-recorded blasts to specified groups, sub groups
13) Integration with Google Voice to take in transcribed voice mails and post to user records based on phone numbers
14) Integration with Chat server to allow based on rules access to chat online with a member/person.
15) Automated workflows to help pipeline people into and through the church
16) Email and/or additional outgoing notification to users on the work/follow ups in their pipeline - "tickler"
17) Integrated min-survey to send out automatically or as a link in email templates
18) Ability to reassign tasks in the pipeline manually but ideally automatically based on rules
19) Ability to control user security to who has access to what information on a granular/functional level
20) Significant security and at least 99.9% scheduled uptime and limit of scheduled downtime to 10 hours/year.
21) Integration with Google Maps to easily plot and see locations, nearby members, get directions.
22) Search engine friendly URLs
23-1billion) Reporting and analytics - flexible, responsive near real time, key metrics reporting of the data --- plus analytics for web traffic if they have a built-in CMS.
For ChMS:
I am actively researching Fellowship One, Connect.Power, Ascribe and possibly Kingdom Tools.
For CMS:
I've also been talking with Ed the web master on the CMS choices -- WordPress, Perch and Unify are all on the table. There are a very large number of options -- one consideration is the time and cost to develop a template. I'm biased toward WordPress as it has syndication tools/plug-ins to post content out to Facebook and Twitter automatically. Ideally the CMS would allow for multiple CSS stylizations so a site could be more mobile phone friendly but remain semi-dynamic.
Outside tools:
1) Email Campaign Management: If we can't find all the email campaign functionality we may have to look at outside options to supplement. We'd possibly needs a gateway to get the mailing list out and hopefully a gateway to get the results pulled back in. There are a number of major, minor and open source options here. (Constant Contact, etc.)
2) Survey system: Preferably integrated to ask mini-surveys and give opportunities for more feedback points. Results could then be quantified and individual responses if it was not anonymous could be attached to the user record as a note. Outside survey software may still be preferable for advanced features. (Survey Monkey, etc)
3) Incoming Voice Mail Transcription and call routing: Using Google Voice and linked email account to suck data into the system and route to a user record and into workflow.
4) Outgoing Voice Mail Forwarding: Record automated messages with a key response from live user to connect to church/volunteer. "Offline" version of an email campaign/blast. Notation of being on list sent out to be batch recorded to user record. (OneCallNow, Phonevite, etc.)
5) Website Based Chat: Option on the web site to have a user launch a chat and be connected to a member/office for more information/follow-up. Standard scripts/replies available for response as well as user can customize. Transcripts can be attached to user account in CMS. (ZopIM, etc.)
6) Information scraping tools: Contact Capture or LinkedIn that scans the emails and addresses in your account and automatically batch adds them to the system. (Broadlook Technologies - Contact Capture, Eclipse, etc)
