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.

Prior to coming on board with Fellowship One, our church had data stored in multiple places, in multiple formats, with multiple people responsible for it.  Spreadsheets of names and addresses, Word documents, propriatery software that only one person had access to etc etc.   Getting information was very difficult and required figuring out which person to go to and whether they had the most accurate version of what you were needing!  Multiple data locations equals data inconsistency and I can personally vouch for this being the case more often than not!

It was out of a personal frustration with inconsistent data in a ministry I was serving in, that I began to look for more of a centralized database management system designed specifically for churches.  I researched this in great detail and ended up producing a 20 page report for our elders.  Through my research there was one clear winner and leader in the Church Management System arena and that was Fellowship One.  The elders approved my conclusion and we’ve never looked back since!

One of the most valuable benefits we immediately realized once we were live with Fellowship One was CENTRAL DATA.  I cannot stress enough how important this is for any church.  Central data, accessible 24 hours a day, to anyone with login credentials.  It may sound simple, but it was a huge step forward for us as a church.  Removing the barriers to our information and having that information be consistent thrust every one of our ministries into a much more efficient mode of operating and freed them up to do more of what they exist for – ministry, not administration.

So, by way of an introduction, I wanted to share a few of the benefits to using a church management system, specifically Fellowship One:

- It is a SaaS system – SaaS stands for Software As A Service which means you pay a monthly fee for an internet based system.  This makes the database available anytime, from any computer with an internet connection.  There are no upgrades to worry about, no maintenance for the end user.  It is platform and device independent.  I believe this is one of the most valuable attributes of Fellowship One and is what sets it apart from many of it’s competitors.

- Unparalleled Children’s Check-In - It is the leader in it’s industry for children’s check-in.  Speaking from experience, our church received an immediate upgrade in professionalism and more importantly the security of our children’s ministries by adopting the children’s check-in system that comes as an option with Fellowship One.  We had much more accurate data immediately available to us and our process for recognizing first time visitors improved greatly.

- Convenient Online Giving – Fellowship One has a great system that you can easily integrate with your church website to allow the congregants to give online.  I’ve walked through setting up this process twice for both the churches I work for and can say with certainty that offering online giving increased the churches overall giving and people really like the opportunity to give in the privacy of their home and especially the option to set up scheduled giving.

- Small Group Management – the small group manager is fantastic!  There are two aspects to it – the front facing web interface which allows people in the congregation to easily find a small group they may be interested in and such details as where it meets, when it meets, whether child care is provided etc.  Then there is the back-end that the leaders have access to – it allows them to accept members into the group, see information about where they live etc, mass email the entire group and more!

Other highlights of the system are (in no particular order):

- It is continuously improving
- It is feature rich
- It has an API for custom programing which is standards based
- They provide excellent video training for the church staff and any other users
- They have excellent customer service
- It has a powerful query system
- It integrates easily with your existing website
- It has powerful communication tools
- It makes volunteer management much easier
- Event registrations are streamlined

There are many more features of Fellowship One that makes it a huge blessing to any church that uses it.  Whether your church is small or large, having an infrastructure like what Fellowship One provides will free up ministry leaders to focus on what they are good at, producing higher returns on ministry, effecting God’s Kingdom in bigger ways!  There’s nothing to lose – check them out!