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.
