How to Manage Church Data, People, Sermons and Donations using Church Software
A successful management of the congregation is an objective all pastors and church leaders desire to obtain. They are continuously looking for new and improved solutions to run all the administrative activities faster and more smoothly.
The best way to save time, effort and money with these activities is to use special software which is dedicated to the management of your church.
There are software solutions for all types of churches, regardless of the fact that they’re small, with only a couple of members, medium-sized or even churches with hundreds of members.
The applications can be simple, consisting of only one module (these are used mostly by small or low-budget churches) or they can be made of several modules, for a complete management of all activities that take place in a big church.
Managing sermons
Managing sermons is one of the most important tasks of a pastor or church leader. Fortunately, nowadays there are many software applications developed for sermon management.
There are software program that allow you to organize all the sermons in chronological order or by categories of subjects. This type of software offers the opportunity to record the reactions of your parishioners during and after the sermon and allow easy retrieval of the date when the pastor held the preaching and its duration, by searching certain keywords. The sermons kept in this way by the program can be sorted by date or kept in various categories depending on their theme and type.
The software allows both viewing the preaching on the monitor as well as printing it.
The managed sermons can be divided into categories and sub-categories; you can also draw up a list of sermons in which you can then search with the help of the sort function, then you can edit the content, download and listen to it.
Some church programs let you add a new sermon to the list of available sermons through a simple process that consists of three steps:
- Adding the sermon – consists of writing in detail the identifiers (title, category – on different types of subjects - eg. Prayer, Bible, humility, pride, - series, a key passage, date, content.
- Adding the content of the sermon.
- Adding it to the mass-media - this means that you can choose a separate section to record the impressions on the audience and the reactions of the parishioners, so that in the future you will be able to bring improvements. As an additional feature, you can give access to sermons only to specified group(s) of people.
Managing people
A good communication between the pastor and the members of the congregation is extremely important. The pastor must know his parishioners very well so that they would feel they are an important and integrated part of the congregation.
Therefore, a software for managing the congregation members is more than welcomed. With it church leaders will be able to record different information about the parishioners: their contact details (email, phone, address), personal data (date of birth, date of baptism, marriage date,) data on family members, information on important events in the life of the Parish, their belonging to different groups within the church, participation in jobs and in various activities with humanitarian character, data on labour contributions or contributions in money, photos from various events, any aids received, particular skills and talents, volunteer activities, information on their health, records on the best time of day to call them, etc.
Keeping complete and updated database on the congregation members is very helpful for pastors, constituting a major contributing to the success of their mission.
Managing donations
The software for managing donations facilitates a great deal the work of church employees by helping them keep a correct evidence of donations, donors and donation promises. With this particular type of software you can sort the data records by donor, the type of donation, the donated amount or the data in which the donation was made; the sorting can be made either ascending or descending. You will also be able to keep records for incomes or income taxes and display them on pre-printed forms.
You can make separate sections for the Sunday donations as opposed to donations made to gather large amounts for various causes such as the extension of the church or rehabilitation works.
The software also allows sending personalized letters and e-mails for informing the donors about fund raising and the purpose for which the money will be used.
Managing Church data
Church Management Software offer easy to use solutions to store, catalogue and update data. The data is kept in a database which you can organize as you wish. The more complex applications use various databases, each for a different category of information: church members, contacts, logs, donations, requests and so on.
Other programs offer a single, large database that is able to store information from a group of churches or a group of offices that belong to the same ministry and are connected through a Local Area Network. This way data is kept more consistent.
With the help of church management software a lot of time and effort is saved.
Church Software Packages
