Tony Dye

CITRT: The Church IT RoundTable

For all things Church IT related, check out the new and improved CITRT.org.  Please join the CITRT group on LinkedIn.

Early Warning to Help Prevent Back Door Losses

We're all pretty familiar with the idea of back door losses at churches and most would like to see the back door closed.  Today's ChMS products have data that could help warn of potential exits, but most of the time the analysis work to learn from that data is a bit too hard for "normal" people to deal with.  What a frustration -- the belief that helpful data exists, but too much trouble to process it.

Well, I think I have some good news.  A friend has developed a solution that helps monitor the status of a congregation's membership.  The nice thing is that he (through his product) does all the hard stuff, digging through the data, to produce *easy to read* reports that tell you exactly who is at risk.  The output is simple: some dashboard reports and graphs, that show, by individual, who the church needs to check up on.  There are several levels of warning, from a "first hint," all the way up through a critical/urgent, "do something right now" situation.  Currently, the solution works with Shelby, but plans are to connect to ACS and Fellowship One very soon.  If this is something that sounds interesting, please let me know and I'll help make a connection for you.

Here's a bit of a pre-announcement about this solution/service:

A Dunwoody (GA) based company, Integrity Financial Services (IFS), is looking to partner with two large churches: one utilizing ACS and one utilizing Fellowship One as its church management system.  In June 2009, IFS launched a second-generation product specifically for churches, SheepGate, to track and monitor monthly changes to its membership bases by named individual.  Each month, SheepGate also identifies named individuals exhibiting early warning signs of disengagement from the congregation.  Churches can then use that prioritized listing of "at risk" members to focus its congregational shepherding and retention efforts. SheepGate is currently integrated with Shelby Systems, church management system.  IFS wishes to provide two partner churches with its SheepGate product at no charge in exchange for the opportunity to create and document implementation with ACS and Fellowship One using live data.  IFS is targeting a July 31 integration for ACS and Fellowship One.

I'll be posting this same information on the ChMS discussion list, so feel free to post follow-up there.

Business is in the Details

A couple of my buddieshave started a new site focused on helping small businesses.  They give away a lot of their wisdom and learning (not always the same thing) on the site.  Their tag line is so clear and also what sets them apart from many of the academic professionals: "For people making payroll, by people making payroll."  If that's you, or if you're even thinking about a small business, you might want to check them out.  BusinessIsInTheDetails

Oh yeah, they're also on twitter as bizdetails.

Think You Want to Start Your Own Business?

I attended a Business Development Conference Tuesday that was primarily focused on people who want to start their own business.  The negative side of me wants to say that I didn't hear anything that I hadn't heard before.  Well, like the story of the professional athlete who goes to a trainer, he rarely hears of some new technique, he gets to review what he should already know.  That's exactly what this conference did, and it was just what I needed.

The first presentation was titled "Starting Your Own Business" and it was presented by John Hilliard of the Lexington KY branch of SCORE.  About 40 PowerPoint slides, but it was slide number 4 that nailed me.  Ten questions of self assessment.  Here are the questions:

1. Are you a self-starter?
2. Do you enjoy competition?
3. Do you have will power and self-discipline?
4. Do you enjoy making decisions?
5. Are you a good planner?
6. Do you manager your finances well?
7. Are you willing to work 12-14 hour days?
8. Are you physically and emotionally strong?
9. Is your family supportive of your proposal?
10. Do you easily interact with other people.

For the assessment, rate each item on a 1-10 scale, where 10 means "absolutely," and 7 means "probably."  Then add all the point values (max of 100 possible).  Then slide #5 asks the simple question: did you score 90 or higher?  Wow... that requires a pretty high rating on EVERY item on the list.  Hmmm...

I don't think I'll share my score just yet.  How about you?

CLEAR Performance Update

Now that I've had a few days of using CLEAR in a mobile environment, I've learned something that's a bit too simple: Performance is based almost entirely on signal strength.  When I have all bars green ("Perfect Signal"), I consistently get 9.5-10 MBit downloads.  When signal strength drops down to just 2 or 3 bars (of 10), then speed also drops down to 2-3 MBit.

The good news: most of the places I frequent have something very close to that "Perfect" signal.  And, of course, even a 2-3 MBit data rate is not bad when sitting in a coffee shop.

Yup, I'm happy! :-)