techpastor.com

Generation Church has been going for almost two years, and until now we have relied heavily on third party software to manage our pastoral care database.

At the current moment we are using the excellent Excellerate church management software from Micro System Design. Originally developed by Pete Sciacchetano for Bethany World Prayer Center, Excellerate has been very good to us as an organisation.

There are however down sides to using a one size fits all approach:

• When we need something specific done for our needs, we can’t change the scope of the application
• Web integration is simple and not all that well integrated.
• Uses the Microsoft access Jet engine as is database system.

Jet is good for small operations, but as soon as you want to go for more than 10 concurrent connections, errors and corruption can be an issue. This will become a big issue when we build our call center. Jet isn’t a multi-user database solution.

This has been a project I’ve wanted to start for many months now and we have grown to a size where we are wanting to carefully track where people are on the Generation Journey.

• Member management and tracking
• Visitor and member call outs
• Generation Journey flowline
• Small groups; life groups - connect groups
• Classes - training and discipleship
• Attendance statistics
• Full web integration
• Mass emails and sms - eNewsletters, bulk email, texts
• Reporting - analysis and statistics
• Mail merging
• Online mapping - data analysis
• Extensible framework

In part II we will define the scope of the application by asking some key questions about your church.