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...

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....

ProVision User Training, Day 1

Today we did our first real *user* training on ProVision.  I was kind of surprised (mostly pleasantly :-) that Whitney went way beyond just a showing, and actually let the 25 or so users get into the product and do hands-on!  Most of the focus today was on one of the keys of ProVision: familiarity.

In years past, I used the term "easy," and then tried "friendly."  OK, those are both good terms, but not necessarily accurate.  If you're an Outlook user, you might think it's easy or friendly.  However, there are plenty of other Outlook users who use it all the time, but think it is very UN-friendly.  Both of these groups still use it, and have learned to work within it.  Our claim (and it's proving to be mostly true) is that if you are familiar with Outlook, then using ProVision will also be familiar.  (Interestingly, a few people are learning features of Outlook during our ProVision training - hopefully that's a bonus)

Much of the day was focused on very basic things.  (do you retrain your staff on basics, often?)  Basics of navigation.  How to search.  How to search in a way to actually find somebody.  Searching on first AND last name at the same time, or pieces of each name.  These are basic, yet worth some focused time.  Some people saw this as a great benefit of our new system.  Dare we tell them it worked in the old system too?

After the break, Jim took over, touching on a lot more basics, like Internet Explorer toolbars.  It seems we can never over-train on the basics.  Then he continued, drilling into more details, like the way to look at families, and then members of families.  A bonus: according to Steve Bauserman, if you call Microsoft and mention that you're using CRM from the ACTS group, Microsoft should refer to the "C" in CRM as Congregation.  Even if they're just thinking about doing that, wow!

ProVision Launch Status

It was exactly one year ago today that we announced our ChMS decision.  A lot has happened since then.  Development...A Code Name...Installations...Demos...Scope Creep...Schedule Delays...Change in Subcontractors...Press Release...Change in Name...We even had a User's Group Meeting!  A few weeks ago, we did our first conversion of data, and then just over two weeks ago we started our IT and Super-User training.

This week, we start the training for our first group of "regular" users, and have a second group next week.  Then we do one final data conversion, set the bi-directional connector to our live database, and then give the big "GO" signal, and take it live.  Our most optimistic schedule has that go-live date the week of December 10.  And yes, we do have some fall-back plans in case our next couple of weeks turn up more than a reasonable number of surprises.

What's most interesting is that the go-live date isn't the end of the road -- it's the beginning.  After we get the basics up and running, there's quite a schedule of enhancements that will keep us quite busy for at least another year.  When is that slow time that people talk about?

Our Awesome Training Setup

For our ProVision Training, we needed some special training facilities.  Our normal training room is good for maybe 6 to 10 people, but we needed 20 or so stations all at once, and in a somewhat quieter space.  We considered a lot of off-site locations, at least until we looked at costs.  What to do?

Well...we're fortunate that we have a "mid size" auditorium very close to our IT area and we were able to secure it for three full days.  Then, through what I can only call a miracle, we had some machines ready to be deployed, but not yet committed.  Between those machines, an assortment of WinTerms, and by raiding our regular training room, we came up with 20 systems, including monitors.  Then, our wonderful Viant team, along with some other friends, spent a late evening AND an early morning bringing everything together.  Lots of cables for network, power, keyboards, etc., fairly nicely organized, so not much of a tripping problem.

A raised floor and wiring troughs would have been nice, but all things considered, this came out looking great.  Here are a few different views: