After a whirlwind of change in the Mazelin family, I am excited to announce the news that starting on November 1st, I will be a Fellowship Technologies (or more accurately, Active Network) employee!!  If you haven’t heard of Fellowship Technologies, check them out here or read my blog post here.  I accepted the position of Senior Client Application Specialist and I am thrilled about this new opportunity to serve God in the context of Church Management Software!  Since I was a small child, I have always had an active interest in computers and especially software and the web and this new job represents a merging of two of my highest passions – technology and the church.  I am counting it a great privilege that I get to work for what I believe to be the best church software company in the world! 

A number of months ago my husband and I started sensing that God was moving us towards a new chapter in our lives.  We were living in Michigan and began to “knock on some doors” to see if moving to Texas was the direction God would lead us in.  Within no time at all, my husband was offered an internal transfer with his company that happened to have a division in Flower Mound, Texas – a few miles away from the main offices of Fellowship Tech.  The new position was a promotion and one which suited his skill sets even more than the position he already had.  The only obstacle we faced was selling our home, which given current market conditions could have taken a long time.  We listed it and within 24 hours, we had a full price offer and sold it!  Only God!

During our first house hunting trip to Texas, I was contacted by Fellowship Tech regarding an opening they had.  After numerous interactions with members of the Development and Support Teams, I was delighted to accept their offer of employment and know without a doubt that this is part of God’s direction for us as a family on our new adventure in Texas!

God has used the words to this song by Twila Paris at many significant junctions in my life and I pray they are a blessing to you too:

There is a great, broad road to nowhere,
And so many travel there,
But I have a gentle Shepherd,
I would follow anywhere,
Though the journey take me far away,
From the place I call my home,
To be ever in His presence,
Where He leads me I will go.

Where He leads me, I will follow,
When He calls me I will hear.

In 2010, I went to the Dynamic Church Conference held by Fellowship One at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas.  I went to a session called “Sticky Church” presented by Matt McMaster and Chris Risen.  The information I gleaned from this session was priceless and completely changed my understanding of attributes and statuses and how to use them most effectively.  I immediately went back to our staff and we implemented some changes in our database that had a big impact on how we use Fellowship One!

We were using the “status” field as one of the most important fields in our database.  We were overly organized in how many statuses we had and it was getting confusing.  Every time a person would change into a different status category, we would lose the history of where they came from.  This was key assimilation data and we couldn’t afford to be losing it.  Also, the reports and queries were so difficult for our staff to understand because of our overly granular status system.

So,  instead of leaning heavily on the status field, we decided to greatly simplify our status groups as three main statuses – Attendee, Member, Dropped.  Everyone who visits, even if they only ever come once, gets the status of Attendee.  This took some getting used to but to further classify, we went ahead and developed an Attribute group called “Assimilation Process”.  Within that group we have various individual attributes but the most important one we use is what we call “Active and on Mailing List”.  Every attendee or member in our database that we consider part of our active church body, gets this individual attribute.  It is manually added on an individual basis and it has to be.  It takes a little work but the pay off is HUGE.  Many of our reports, queries, and general day to day operations in Fellowship One now depend on our Assimilation Process attribute group and it makes basic tasks much easier than they were when we were trying to depend on the status field.

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Fellowship One - Powerful Church Management Solution

I am primarily a web designer on staff with two local churches but my other main role with these churches is to manage their church database management system.  We use a system called  Fellowship One. I’ve been working with the database for 3 years now and know the ins and outs of it very well. I’ve also worked with the Development side of it which is called the API – short for Application Programming Interface.  The API allows you to securely access your data via a “backdoor” so to speak.  I used the API to allow our website users to login to our website using their Fellowship One username and password.  I will explain more about this in a future blog post!

However, my purpose here is to give an overview of the strengths of Fellowship One for anyone who may be considering a new Church Management System.

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