3 Tools to Help Shrink Your Church

by · May 6, 2010

The world of local church ministry is a unique place. The inter-office politics, weekly production needs, and awkward communication routines have created a niche market for equipping and resourcing church leaders. Honestly, there are hundreds of tools out there and many of them do the same thing, this post is just a few of our favs and ones that we have experience with. If you have others, comment below and help a brother out, we hope to make this a regular feature on Stc.

Planning Center
Attention worship leaders, program managers, technical directors, and producers: If you don’t use Planning Center, well, you need to. Planning Center is a web-based application that allows you to create easy-to-edit workflows of your worship services and events. Within each service, you can track time live for each element of the service as well as upload charts, audio, and video for each song in the program. Each person involved in the service can login with their email address and see their role at anytime during the week. For a worship leader, it is a great tool for communicating with your band and making sure the can not complain about not having the music in time.

Planning Center has many more features, but from an internal communication standpoint, it centralizes and limits the workload for all the people involved. You can take a tour of the application here and see the pricing option here.

BoomText
You know about Facebook, Twitter, email newsletters, and blogging, but there is another little-known tool at your disposal when it comes to communicating with your church… text. If you are like me, your fingers are as agile as a Chinese gymnast from texting thousands of characters a day. Currently, text messaging is the chosen method of communicating for most age groups and on average, text messages are read 10 times more than emails. Meet BoomText, a text message marketing tool that is affordable, easy to use, and church friendly.

When you sign up with BoomText, you are given a login to a dashboard which allows to create keywords, manage contact lists, edit opt-in greetings, and of course, send text ‘blasts’ to your subscribers. For example, a regular attender at Grace Christian Church would pick up his or her cell phone and text the word “gracecc” to 411247 (BoomText’s exclusive shortcode). From there, the person’s cell phone is added to a database that only the GraceCC admin can see and manage. The rest is pretty simple, the admin can send the subscriber list updates and news as well as hold voting or Q&A sessions with the congregation from the comfort of their cell phones. The best part, BoomText has a history of working with churches and is has custom plans to meet the unique need of a local body. Check it out here.

Basecamp
When it comes to large churches, things get done on a project by project basis. A need is identified, someone calls a meeting, action points are established, and the individuals leave the meeting and forget what they are supposed to do. If this sounds too familiar, you need to check out Basecamp.

Basecamp is a web-based project management tool that basically functions as the meeting away from the meeting. Inside of the Basecamp dashboard, you can create and manage projects, upload files, assign to do items, chat, and set milestones. It is a great way centralize the process for planning events, print projects, and launching initiatives. With Basecamp, you no longer have to argue over who was supposed to do what and when some thing was due because it manages it for you. Basecamp is affordable, check out the pricing here.

What tools are you using in your church or ministry that are helping?

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  • http://www.mckinneyfellowship.org Kevin Miller

    We are rolling out Manymoon as a web-based project management tool. It is fully integrated with Google Apps, and costs much less than Base Camp. One of its greatest features is you can create project templates that include all the tasks, milestones, documents, etc. We tend to some projects over and over again (like VBS) so we can build a template for the VBS and at the kick off meeting each year – they can select New VBS Project from Template and begin assigning tasks.

  • http://twitter.com/pjhickernell Paul Hickernell

    Our music and production teams use http://www.worshipplanning.com. It allows planners to get information out easily. Team members can get what they need. Creating templates for services and gatherings is user friendly. It has become a great asset for us, especially in a multi-site context.