Tony Dye

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.

Jeopardy Software Concept

I had an opportunity to look at some prototype software yesterday that had what the developer calls his “Jeopardy” feature.  He’s looked at the database he’s working from, and it’s many different views, and for each views he’s extracted numerical info and created all kinds of charts from them.  Basically, he’s tried to automatically chart anything that’s chartable.  In other words, he’s providing answers to questions that users may not have thought of yet, and sometimes, people find those answers to be so valuable they find lots of questions that can be answered.  How often do you stumble across such things, and then realize it’s just what you needed and you don’t know how you ever lived without it?

Does your software help answer questions (GOOD questions) you didn’t know you had?  Easily?  Hopefully we’ll see more of this kind of idea in the future.

Tom Rogers Replaces Hal Campbell

Well...the announcements have been made (BusinessWire), and it's rather public via the newswire services, that Hal Campbell is no longer president and CEO of ACS.  Best wishes for Tom Rogers as he takes the reigns, but I have to say that it's a sad day for me.  I've known and respected Hal for a long time.  Hal, I hope you're not stepping too far outside the ChMS world.

Fellowship Tech Job Openings

Curtis Simmons at Fellowship Technologies asked me to put out a quick reminder that FT is still growing and looking for good people.  Here's more on some current openings.  Here's the general Careers link from the FellowshipTechnologies site. 

Where are the Church IT Tools?

What are the “Missing Tools” that would make IT life easier?  What are those things you constantly need, but are hard to find?  Or at least hard to find on a Church IT budget.

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For me, there are a few “basic” things that it seems nearly everyone needs.  OK, some of us need them more than others, but stay with me here:

• Helpdesk
• Inventory (hardware, software, and hopefully other info)  Sort of like the "cool tool" I wanted a year and a half ago
• Workflow (the processes to get things done)
• Knowledgebase
• User rights, access permissions, to files and other info
• HR stuff (access to directories and such)
• Intranet (announcements, important documents, easy access to key info)
• Document control, archiving, maybe indexing/search
• Task management, goal tracking (departmental and individual)

With the possible exceptions of Knowledgebase & indexing/search, these tools are all built around the idea of a master “people” reference – a core database for people.  Wait, isn’t that exactly what most Church Management systems do?  Wouldn’t it be great if our ChMS systems offered the IT tools churches need?  Hmmm... if ChMS made the IT people happy, how much more likely would we be to help make ChMS successful within the church?

I know of at least two ChMS systems that have "extensibility" as part of the plan.  Does yours?  Let me throw this out to the ChMS vendors/partners: why not help make life better for the IT people?  Just something to think about...

ProVision Final Countdown

We've started our final countdown to going live on ProVision CRM Monday, July 7.  Will it be perfect?  Of course not.  Will it be fantastic anyway?  We believe so.  Is there so much do to in the next few days that we may all go crazy?  Absolutely!

CRM Starts Paying Off

We're not live on CRM yet, but some of the benefits are starting to be visible.  Our staff lives in Outlook all day long.  Now, with ProVision CRM, membership info is right there, without having to open another application.  Happy Days!

ProVision Clarification

In my "If We'd Done Our Homework" post, I may have over-stated when I said we've been waiting 2 1/2 years for ProVision.  We've been *looking* for 2 1/2 years, but actual development on the CRM base didn't start until February of 2007, and really didn't start on what's now ProVision until June or July of 2007, so we're not even to the one year point yet.  Still not where we want to be, but I don't want it to sound like our vendors have just been sitting around doing nothing!  Not at all....

Quick ProVision Update

First the bad news: we're not up and running on ProVision CRM yet.  Of course, that's disappointing.  But, there is good news to go with the story.  I asked Steve Bauserman of the ACTS group to give a quick update.  Here are his key points:

1. ProVisionCRM is the first application moved to Microsoft CRM 4.0
2. Complete Data Migration Tool (nobody else migrates attendance history, calendar, contribution history and pledge history) is 98% complete
3. ProVisionCRM On Demand is complete and has two implementations running with a third in process (check scanning and check-in not required)
4. ProVisionCRM On Premise is 95% complete (check scanning and check-in are in development) with two implementations in process
5. Over 20 churches and denominations are talking with ACTS Group about adopting ProVisionCRM as their Congregation Relationship Management System
6. ProVisionCRM is a foundational product which encourages ministries to have the information system they have always wanted
7. ProVisionCRM has multiple integrated accounting solutions ranging from QuickBooks to Microsoft Dynamics GP

At Perimeter, we're deep into looking at the quality of the data migration and looking ahead to our public web integration.  We wish ProVision CRM (we're calling it ProChurch internally, to recognize all it does) were done, and at the same time we know it will never be "done."  Exciting times are ahead :-)

ProVision CRM Update

It's been about a month since I last posted an update on ProVision CRM.  Things have seemed very quiet since then, but actually, a lot has been happening.

Here's what's happening right now:

• The first ProVisionCRM church goes live THIS week
• Twenty plus churches are talking to ACTS about moving to ProVisionCRM ("talk" meaning working on timing and requirements)
• ProVisionCRM is available as either on-premise or hosted solution;
• Microsoft has lowered the price of CRM to accommodate the faith based community!
• Microsoft has made GP available as a hosted solution at a fire sale price, making ProVisionCRM an enterprise solution for churches of all sizes
• In the next 60 days check scanning and check-in become available
• Before year-end, Asterisk/Hud integration will be available for ProVisionCRM

There's even more good news coming.  I can't say more now, but here's a quick hint.