Church Membership Management Software -
What it means in Cloud Era?

In general, a study says that religious institutions have adopted modern technology to streamline their processes, as well as to improve the activities of their congregations. As much as 74% of churches qualitatively facilitate giving via online channels. The emergence and widespread use of church management software makes almost all the key aspects of religious community life much simpler to organize, monitor and manage.

What are the key requirements of Church Membership Management Software ?

The days of using Excel or Spread Sheet based database programs are gone. Storing all data in a Single PC Computer / Laptop or in a external storage device is a old dated technique. Now a days all church member data are safely stored in a cloud based Church CRM applications.

The general purpose CRM applications and Open Source CRM applications are mainly designed for Commercial Businesses. They do not serve well in case of a Church Community Organisation. So it is adviseable to use special purpose Church Membership Management Software. The following are the key functional requirements

1. Member Profile Data: The church membership system is designed to store various profile data include first name, last name, family name, baptism info, family relations, professional /occupational info, address info, email, contact phone / mobile, membership start date, membership renewel date and marriage related info.
2. Edit / Update Data: The software should support update of the data. The address and contact points info are frequent change candidates.
3. Subscription Info: Most of the churches charge a nominal fee towards the membership. The system should have the ability to track their payments and subscriptions.
4. Link Members: Family is the basic community structure. The church software should have the ability to link the members based on their family relationship.
5. Search / Filter: Being a digital database system, the software should have robust filtering and sorting functionalities. The user can search the data based on keywords or by profile data params.
6. Export Data: The church membership management software should support exporting the members database as common used spread sheet friendly data files.
7. Import Data: To assit the migration from other Church Database Software, it is good to have a Import Data option.
8. Member Groups: The software should have the options to create members group based on selected members.
9. Mass E-Mail / Send Newsletter: Most of the modern cloud based Church Membership Management software readily support sending newsletter to all members or selected list of memebers.
10. Mass Text (SMS) Messaging: By integrating with Text Messaging API, the software powers the admin user to send SMS to all member of selected list of members.