Church management software in the cloud or not

[Gary Creely]

I have been looking to various church management software, and I am having a hard time swallowing the pill of there price. Both software and cloud solutions seem very pricey for what you get. (at the end of the day these are mostly glorified data bases)

I would be interested to hear from folks who are using these softwares, and particularly those who are using a cloud solution like fellowship one.

[Billy Cox]

I have been looking to various church management software, and I am having a hard time swallowing the pill of there price. Both software and cloud solutions seem very pricey for what you get. (at the end of the day these are mostly glorified data bases)

I would be interested to hear from folks who are using these softwares, and particularly those who are using a cloud solution like fellowship one.

I have done some market research into cloud-based church management software. I was at the time considering development of some church-specific functionality for the Salesforce CRM system, but I decided against it.

Most churches are small but despite what the marketing pitches say, church software is developed with the large church in mind. Price points are typically set to pass muster of church boards where ROI isn't just one of the names for God. The numbers seem high, and that's the end of the sales pitch for small churches, but if you run the numbers, such a system potentially pays for itself in short order.

With regard to the 'glorified database' comment, that's not a fair appraisal. Databases are far from simple. Just ask a non-techie who has waded into Microsoft Access (designed for non-techies) and found themselves quickly in over their head. A database itself is just a collection of information, and it is not particularly useful unless one knows how to process and analyze that information. If any schmoe could do that, we wouldn't even be talking about church management software.

[Gary Creely]

With regard to the 'glorified database' comment, that's not a fair appraisal. Databases are far from simple. A database itself is just a collection of information, and it is not particularly useful unless one knows how to process and analyze that information.

It just does not appear to be very sophisticated software, and it seems the cloud based solutions are obscenely overpriced. They are storing so little for the cost.

My temporary solution is using google docs spread sheets.

[David Parker]

We use Fellowship One.

Very happy with it and I know we are not using it to its' full potential. Intuitive, easy to use, and easily customized.

[Gary Creely]

We use Fellowship One.

Very happy with it and I know we are not using it to its' full potential. Intuitive, easy to use, and easily customized.

I really liked the looks of them, I just couldn't deal with the cost for a ministry of my size. They had me at "iphone app".

[Eisha Nevada]

What we use is the Easy Worship Software. It is known to be a very valuable tool for displaying and managing all your media and has more than 100 video transitions and crossfades. As a good easy worship software package should, EasyWorship has integrated support with PowerPoint 97-2003 and The Song Select Lyric Service (a huge database to download songs directly to the program's database). And the list goes on..

[Rich Schmidt]

Eisha, I don't think they're talking about worship presentation software (like EasyWorship). They're talking about church management software. The kind of thing that lets you track people, attendance, giving, etc.

By the way, welcome to NazNet! It looks like this is your first post! There's a great community of folks here. Welcome!

[Zach Wingo]

I think the best solution out there is The City by Zondervan. It was created by Mars Hill in Seattle and eventually sold to Zondervan which has since made it more robust. It has an amazing amount of features for the price and for most churches is worth the money. For churches under 50 people it's $19 and $39 for churches under $100.

[Gary Creely]

Maybe I am cheap, but that seems like a lot of money to me for an online service. So the first year would be $600 for a church of 51, over ten years a church of 51 would spend $5600 for this (assuming they did not grow). I have been thinking about church management software for a while, but just can not justify swallow the cost for what you get. Out side of the price I like the look of the city, and the idea of it being all online. And for a church of 325 it is nearly $2000 a year. I do not own a piece of software that cost that much and I own a lot of software (Photo shop CS5, illustrator CS5, AutoCAD, Ease, Smaart, ect...) that is high end and in some cases specialty software.

[Rich Schmidt]

I think the best solution out there is The City by Zondervan. It was created by Mars Hill in Seattle and eventually sold to Zondervan which has since made it more robust. It has an amazing amount of features for the price and for most churches is worth the money. For churches under 50 people it's $19 and $39 for churches under $100.

And for a church like mine (averaging 100-130), it's $59/month for the first year, $79/month after that. Oh, but I'd want to be able to track giving, which adds $59/month, bringing my total monthly cost in the first year to $118. Add in the $149 setup fee, and our cost for the first year would be $1,565. I'm sorry, but it's not worth that much, not to me, and not to our church.

I forgot to add that in year 2, our annual cost bumps up to $1,656. I don't need to stretch that out over 10 years like Gary did to say that this is way more money than we want to spend on this.

[Gary Creely]

And for a church like mine (averaging 100-130), it's $59/month for the first year, $79/month after that. Oh, but I'd want to be able to track giving, which adds $59/month, bringing my total monthly cost in the first year to $118. Add in the $149 setup fee, and our cost for the first year would be $1,565. I'm sorry, but it's not worth that much, not to me, and not to our church.

I forgot to add that in year 2, our annual cost bumps up to $1,656. I don't need to stretch that out over 10 years like Gary did to say that this is way more money than we want to spend on this.

I did not realize that the giving and children's module were separate. So if I wanted both of those for my church it would be $106 a month for the first year, and $119 in the second. So over the course of 10 years that would be over $14,000 for a church of 50. The reason I spread it over 10 years is the value in these softwares is tracking various points of data over time.

[Kevin Rector]

Yeah, that software is stupid expensive.

I really just need to write my own and sell it for $5 or $10 a month.

[Rich Schmidt]

I did not realize that the giving and children's module were separate. So if I wanted both of those for my church it would be $106 a month for the first year, and $119 in the second. So over the course of 10 years that would be over $14,000 for a church of 50. The reason I spread it over 10 years is the value in these softwares is tracking various points of data over time.

Good point. We're still using Church Helpmate, which we bought back in... 2002? Unfortunately, after about 3 years we quit really using it for anything beyond recording people's giving so we can spit out annual contribution receipts.

Which reminds me, they've recently developed a "cloud" solution that costs $45/month for up to 100 households. You can read about it at http://www.helpmate.net.

[Bud Pugh]

Has anybody checked out FiveTalent software? The company was begun and is run by a young Nazarene layman. They are also responsible for much of the development of Grace and Peace magazine and other web publications of the church. They no longer publish their pricing on their site but it seemed pretty reasonable last I knew; they used to offer the software for free to NewStarts (and probably still do- I just don't see it on their site) and at a very reasonable cost to churches under 50 in attendance. You may want to check them out.

http://www.fivetalent.com/church/chu...tware/overview

Bud

[Gary Creely]

Has anybody checked out FiveTalent software? The company was begun and is run by a young Nazarene layman. They are also responsible for much of the development of Grace and Peace magazine and other web publications of the church. They no longer publish their pricing on their site but it seemed pretty reasonable last I knew; they used to offer the software for free to NewStarts (and probably still do- I just don't see it on their site) and at a very reasonable cost to churches under 50 in attendance. You may want to check them out.

http://www.fivetalent.com/church/chu...tware/overview



Bud

They are cheaper @ $65 a month versus $119, but is does not appear as nice. Their site was also rather sluggish I noticed.

I think these guys business models are not the greatest. I think $10-$15 a month is a fair cost for this type of service. At that price I think they could sell way more churches on it. I know I would consider it at that price. Even @ $65 a year it is over $700 a year each and every year. Way to much for a glorified data base.

[Rich Schmidt]

They are cheaper @ $65 a month versus $119, but is does not appear as nice. Their site was also rather sluggish I noticed.

I think these guys business models are not the greatest. I think $10-$15 a month is a fair cost for this type of service. At that price I think they could sell way more churches on it. I know I would consider it at that price. Even @ $65 a year it is over $700 a year each and every year. Way to much for a glorified data base.

At the same time, "selling way more churches on it" means that their costs go up (including customer service for all those churches). Maybe they've all found the "sweet spot" for this particular market.

Still, I'd love to see a game-changer come in and do it all much, much more cheaply.

[Zach Wingo]

Last year I attended An Event Apart in Seattle where I sat next to two designers that had recently been hired by Zondervan. These were very talented guys and it shows in the work they've done. If you can get the funding we can start ASAP. Yes, this would be exciting!

Still, I'd love to see a game-changer come in and do it all much, much more cheaply.

I can develop something just like The City with the same or more functionality. I and several friends would be more than happy to build it and maintain it once it's built. Here are some conservative estimates:

Initial Costs
# of initial full-time developers: 2
# of initial full-time designers: 2
# of system administrators: 1
Starting wages: $50k-$60k
Premium Redundant hosting: $2000-$4000 monthly
Time: 6-8 months at 40 hours week

Total Startup Cost: $340,000

After Launch:
# of customer support representatives: 5
# of billing/sales/administrative: 2
# of full-time developers: 3
# of initial full-time designers: 2
# of system administrators: 2
Wages: $25k-$70k
Premium Redundant hosting: $2000-$4000 monthly

Yearly cost to maintain: $630,000

These prices do not include other expenses like offices. We can do a flat $10 month for everything so we only need 6000 churches to break even.

I know exactly what you're thinking...we can do it cheaper. Yes we can! We'll start by asking the developers/designers/administrators to take a pay cut for the kingdom. How about a $20k below secular standards. That removes a whopping $140k! We can then remove the utility costs by using a church building for offices which should save another $80-$100k. This leaves us around $480,000 yearly budget requiring us to only have 4000 churches. Let's do it!

[Gary Creely]

I know exactly what you're thinking...we can do it cheaper. Yes we can! We'll start by asking the developers/designers/administrators to take a pay cut for the kingdom. How about a $20k below secular standards. That removes a whopping $140k! We can then remove the utility costs by using a church building for offices which should save another $80-$100k. This leaves us around $480,000 yearly budget requiring us to only have 4000 churches. Let's do it!

Couple things here. You do not need to be the city, in fact much of that functionality would go unused in most churches. I see the primary features as tracking attendance, giving, budgets, contacts, and email groups. I am aware of a company like this that started with 2 guys total. Again I am not looking for the city, just a reliable easy to use in the cloud church tracking software. As a for instance, the city has a blogging feature- who cares! there are dozens of places I can do that for free!

There are 300,000 churches in the USA (and the software would be globally useful ) so 6000 churches only represents 2% of US churches, and is not far fetched.

The fact is the pricing of these services is way off for what you get as a consumer.

Here is pricing that I would consider. Free 3 months trial 19.99 month to month (regardless of church size or features used), or $14.99 if paid by the year. The free trial is key, because there is a significant investment in setting it up so the chances of retaining those trials is pretty decent. I believe a service priced this way could very well get 6000 users after a few years.

[Zach Wingo]

You do not need to be the city, in fact much of that functionality would go unused in most churches.

Yes, and that is one of the key reasons why most churches continue to struggle with engaging their culture using relevant tools. Certainly churches don't have to use The City, but I find it ironic that it's always the small struggling churches that don't see a need for this stuff.

[Greg Gates]

I was searching out cloud based church management systems as far back as 2001, before the word cloud existed. I have researched dozen and dozens of products, including all the ones mentioned here. I created a very rigorous feature list, and a few years ago found a company that I am absolutely thrilled with. www.membershipedge.com. This robust program performs exactly as you expect it to. Can't say enough good things about it.

[Gary Creely]

Yes, and that is one of the key reasons why most churches continue to struggle with engaging their culture using relevant tools. Certainly churches don't have to use The City, but I find it ironic that it's always the small struggling churches that don't see a need for this stuff.

Firstly I think a second rate social network type of service is not what many churches need. Facebook already exists and lots of your people are on it, why would you try to get them to go somewhere else.

I would agree that small struggling churches often do not see value in technology in general, or many forward thinking ideas in general. Many do not even have a web site. However, that is not what we are talking about here. Church management software is really a back office sort of detail, that can be done through the likes of google docs (my current approach). If I was pastoring a church of 1000 I would not want to drop that much money on that.

My thing with the city is that it is a bad value, not a bad service. Small struggling churches need to pay for heat, and the cost of the city for a year is nearly 2 months worth. This is not the kind of thing that will make or break a ministry.

[Gary Creely]

I was searching out cloud based church management systems as far back as 2001, before the word cloud existed. I have researched dozen and dozens of products, including all the ones mentioned here. I created a very rigorous feature list, and a few years ago found a company that I am absolutely thrilled with. www.membershipedge.com. This robust program performs exactly as you expect it to. Can't say enough good things about it.

Well their price is more like it. I will check them out. For my church it would be like $11 a month. It does not look as nice as the city though, but at like 8% of the cost I am interested.

[Zach Wingo]

Firstly I think a second rate social network type of service is not what many churches need. Facebook already exists and lots of your people are on it, why would you try to get them to go somewhere else.

It's this kind of thinking that keeps churches small and irrelevant. The City is not a "second rate social network type of service" nor is it a replacement for Facebook. You clearly don't understand it's purpose. Mars Hill in Seattle created The City for a very specific purpose ─ to facilitate community and church movement. Comparing The City to Facebook is like comparing an iPhone to a iMac ─ they may have similarities but are designed for completely different purposes.

My thing with the city is that it is a bad value, not a bad service. Small struggling churches need to pay for heat, and the cost of the city for a year is nearly 2 months worth. This is not the kind of thing that will make or break a ministry.

It is a logical fallacy to say that because some churches can't afford it, it is therefore a bad value. It is not a bad value and your comments are unfounded. Their pricing is inline with other similar services. If you can't afford it just say so but stop bashing them.

[Gary Creely]

It's this kind of thinking that keeps churches small and irrelevant. The City is not a "second rate social network type of service" nor is it a replacement for Facebook. You clearly don't understand it's purpose. Mars Hill in Seattle created The City for a very specific purpose ─ to facilitate community and church movement. Comparing The City to Facebook is like comparing an iPhone to a iMac ─ they may have similarities but are designed for completely different purposes.

No this is the type of thing that companies like Zondervan try to make money on, becuase small irrelevant churches think this overpriced service will magically move them towards relevance. It is clearly designed for a larger type church that has a different set of needs, but the online community is not going to be used by many in the church. Online community is online community, trying to move people to your private community is just generally a poor idea and doesn't work in most circumstances. Maybe it worked for mars hill, but many of the churches I am familiar with (I work with all types of ministries everyday) just would benifit from a second rate online community.

It is a logical fallacy to say that because some churches can't afford it, it is therefore a bad value. It is not a bad value and your comments are unfounded. Their pricing is inline with other similar services. If you can't afford it just say so but stop bashing them.

Here is this thing, we could afford it if we were convinced it was a worth wile venture. I just think for what you get the cost is way high. We need to put our dollars in the most effective places, and as I said I am looking for more of the back office type of thing than all the other stuff.

You are the only one in this thread justifying the price, in fact the thing I was responding to was the suggestion that it is a good price. I am not looking to bash the service, becuase it does look very nice (even though I am not sold on the community part of it). The cost is out of line, and ultimately they will change it or go out of business. In fairness it does really look geared to a larger ministry.

[Zach Wingo]

You missed the point and made it at the same time. It has nothing to do with Facebook or Twitter or any other tool but rather it's about understanding thoughts, patterns and habits of people. The City is not for everyone, but it's not just for large churches. These products do not make churches relevant but relevant churches will use these types of services. Your church probably wouldn't benefit from it. This is exactly what our church needs and we aren't large (about 200 people). It is still illogical to say that because some churches wouldn't use all the features that it is therefore a bad value. There is nothing like it on the market and it is inline with other similar services. One thing is true, this type of service won't make a church relevant; Irrelevant churches will still be irrelevant even with the best tools.

[Kevin Rector]

These products do not make churches relevant but relevant churches will use these types of services.

There are plenty of "relevant" churches that will have no use for a service like The City. You need to realize that "relevant" and "hipster" is not the same thing. Any church that is doing effective ministry in their own context is "relevant". My church is in the country, it would be pretty irrelevant for us to use a package called The City wouldn't it?

[Houston Thomas]

Two other options to consider:

SoChurch and The Table Project

No idea if they are for relevant or irrelevant churches

[Greg Gates]

...It does not look as nice as the city though...

nope. but it works like a dream.

[Eisha Nevada]

Eisha, I don't think they're talking about worship presentation software (like EasyWorship). They're talking about church management software. The kind of thing that lets you track people, attendance, giving, etc.

By the way, welcome to NazNet! It looks like this is your first post! There's a great community of folks here. Welcome!

Aww. Sorry, just want to share with you guys about the Worship Software we are using. Sorry if it sound unrelated but we are also using Church Management Software knowing a good church management software program can do a lot more for our church and for the congregation that we probably realize.

Anyway, thanks for the warm welcome and for being not rude like the other. I appreciate that.

[Billy Cox]

Both software and cloud solutions seem very pricey for what you get. (at the end of the day these are mostly glorified data bases)

Since this thread has bubbled back up to the surface, I find myself asking the question "what could church management software do that would justify the current price?"

I'm about 18 months into a corporate implementation of Salesforce.com (cloud based system), and while I am reasonably certain that Salesforce is vastly superior to any management software specifically tailored to churches, only a very large church could get sufficient return on investment on such a system.

If you can do everything you need to do in Excel (hopefully at least a legal copy), then by all means, use Excel.

[Rich Schmidt]

If you can do everything you need to do in Excel (hopefully at least a legal copy), then by all means, use Excel.

And if you don't have a legal copy of Excel, then use the free OpenOffice or Google Docs.

[Mike Schutz]

These products do not make churches relevant but relevant churches will use these types of services.

I recognize that our church is likely "irrelevant," as Zach would define it. While we have between 600-1,000 folks visit our campus every week for compassionate ministry, preschool, after school programs, children's ministry, youth programs, we only have 150 in church on Sunday morning. A good one third of the folks we serve do not have regular access to email or the internet, due primarily to cost. Our "irrelevance" is further demonstrated in that we still use Powerpoint for worship (because it is already installed on our computers), Quickbooks for our treasurer (because it is what we use to keep the books at preschool), and Excel for lists of members, attendance, etc. Our website is horrible, because I can't find anyone to keep it up - every person who would be competent is already working several jobs to put food on the table.

Church management programs have failed to show small churches that there is benefit to diverting limited resources from ministries, just so the church secretary, treasurer and senior pastor have an easier time tracking folks. The comparison to worship presentation software is relevant. Why should I spend several hundred dollars - taken from other ministries - in order to do something that we are already doing, just because it will be easier to do?

Reminded me of a conversation I had the other day with a guy who wanted to sell me a "small groups leadership training platform." Sounds really cool, looks good, and would enable me to more easily link our teachers and leaders to video content that might be helpful, most of which I could not get anywhere else at that price. Sounds great, except that it costs more than my entire adult ministries budget.

Sure, I know that we are not the target church for the folks who sell these programs. They want churches who already have all the essential bases covered - things like heat, electricity, and making sure our senior adults can buy their medication and still eat, and our children and teens can go to camp. If that makes us "irrelevant," so be it.

[Billy Cox]

And if you don't have a legal copy of Excel, then use the free OpenOffice or Google Docs.

True dat. I've been using OpenOffice for a couple of years now, and Google Docs in a corporate environment. Most people really don't use Excel proficiently enough to notice the difference, so why shell out the bucks for it?

[Warren Johnson]

Maybe I am cheap, but that seems like a lot of money to me for an online service. So the first year would be $600 for a church of 51, over ten years a church of 51 would spend $5600 for this (assuming they did not grow). I have been thinking about church management software for a while, but just can not justify swallow the cost for what you get. Out side of the price I like the look of the city, and the idea of it being all online. And for a church of 325 it is nearly $2000 a year. I do not own a piece of software that cost that much and I own a lot of software (Photo shop CS5, illustrator CS5, AutoCAD, Ease, Smaart, ect...) that is high end and in some cases specialty software.

Hi Gary. It seems to me that in a small church where everybody knows everybody, you really don't need anything fancy to help you keep track of people.

[Dale Schaeffer]

I highly recommend using an inexpensive CMS solution until the size of your staff and lay ministry leaders requires moving to the cloud. We've successfully utilized a fairly inexpensive CMS solution (Church Windows) from launch 6 years ago with 17 people to around 700 regular attenders today. We are just now needing to move things to a more accessible and scalable solution. The biggest suggestion I'd make is to utilize the software for moving people forward in spiritual maturity, pastoral care and connection to the church. If all you're wanting to do is have a solution for tracking attendance and addresses Google Docs is a great solution. But if you're going to really know what's going on in your congregations life and track where people are at in their relationship to the church a strong CMS is invaluable. For example when we have a New Believers class we are able to pull info on everyone who's made decisions for Christ and have not attended yet. We're able to automate important tasks and letters and select specific criteria for who we message. It's an invaluable tool for moving people into membership, managing pastoral care with a lay and ministerial care team, as well as following up systematically with guests.

That being said...there are simple and free (or next to free) solutions that will do the job effectively for quite some time before you have to spend big $ for a CMS.

This is my first post on this board so please be gentle.

[David Parker]

Welcome Dale!

[Rich Schmidt]

I'm digging up this old thread because I'm thinking again about church management software. I have some board members pointing out that we really need to do a better job of keeping track of people, especially new visitors and people who drift away. I personally do a lousy job of this and would love to make it easy for some others to come alongside me to help. So we're probably going to move to some kind of online/web/cloud/hosted solution (use whichever buzzword you prefer).

Obviously, I don't want to pay a lot. We mainly need to track attendance/participation and donations. If it can also include a church/event calendar and a way to schedule volunteers, that would be swell.

Our average attendance is right around 100 people, including kids. But we have enough people who are pretty sporadic in their attendance, along with plenty of first-time guests checking us out, that we're probably talking about 150-200 people in a year's time.

Right now I'm giving a closer look to these three:

Fellowship One

Church Office Online

Membership Edge

F1 would cost $250 to start, then $40/mo ($480/yr). It includes online giving options (nice, though I don't know what the fees are yet).

COO/CMO would cost $20-$30/mo ($240-$360/yr). It has a 60-day free trial.

ME wold cost $133-185/yr. It's by far the cheapest, but the user interface looks so dated that I'm not sure I could make myself use it.

Like I mentioned earlier, we currently use an old Windows-only version of Church Helpmate... and all our laptops are Macs, which means we can only use it on the one (mine) that has Parallels & Win95 on it. Switching to their online version would cost us $35-$45/mo ($420-$540/yr). We've really only been using this for contribution records, and our member info has become so scrambled that I'd want to start fresh with whatever we use, so sticking with this doesn't really benefit us. It has to stand on its own two feet.

So... Anyone want to add further thoughts/comments/experiences?

[Billy Cox]

I'm digging up this old thread because I'm thinking again about church management software. I have some board members pointing out that we really need to do a better job of keeping track of people, especially new visitors and people who drift away. I personally do a lousy job of this and would love to make it easy for some others to come alongside me to help. So we're probably going to move to some kind of online/web/cloud/hosted solution (use whichever buzzword you prefer).

Obviously, I don't want to pay a lot. We mainly need to track attendance/participation and donations. If it can also include a church/event calendar and a way to schedule volunteers, that would be swell.

Our average attendance is right around 100 people, including kids. But we have enough people who are pretty sporadic in their attendance, along with plenty of first-time guests checking us out, that we're probably talking about 150-200 people in a year's time.

Right now I'm giving a closer look to these three:

Fellowship One

Church Office Online

Membership Edge

F1 would cost $250 to start, then $40/mo ($480/yr). It includes online giving options (nice, though I don't know what the fees are yet).

COO/CMO would cost $20-$30/mo ($240-$360/yr). It has a 60-day free trial.

ME wold cost $133-185/yr. It's by far the cheapest, but the user interface looks so dated that I'm not sure I could make myself use it.

Like I mentioned earlier, we currently use an old Windows-only version of Church Helpmate... and all our laptops are Macs, which means we can only use it on the one (mine) that has Parallels & Win95 on it. Switching to their online version would cost us $35-$45/mo ($420-$540/yr). We've really only been using this for contribution records, and our member info has become so scrambled that I'd want to start fresh with whatever we use, so sticking with this doesn't really benefit us. It has to stand on its own two feet.

So... Anyone want to add further thoughts/comments/experiences?

Take a serious look at Salesforce.com cloud-based customer relationship management system.
http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/...rofit_solution

Salesforce is very friendly to non-profits (501c3) and grants 10 free licenses for their Enterprise Edition along with some non-profit specific add-ons. Corporations typically pay about $1,000 per user per year for these licenses, so this is not a stripped-down version. It is a highly customizable system, so you can modify it to accommodate your organization.

I have administered a corporate Salesforce system for a couple of years, so if you want to give it a shot, I would be willing to lend a hand in setting it up...gratis.

[Rich Schmidt]

Take a serious look at Salesforce.com cloud-based customer relationship management system.
http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/...rofit_solution

Salesforce is very friendly to non-profits (501c3) and grants 10 free licenses for their Enterprise Edition along with some non-profit specific add-ons. Corporations typically pay about $1,000 per user per year for these licenses, so this is not a stripped-down version. It is a highly customizable system, so you can modify it to accommodate your organization.

I have administered a corporate Salesforce system for a couple of years, so if you want to give it a shot, I would be willing to lend a hand in setting it up...gratis.

Wow. I'm surprised that I didn't know this. If you really think it can cover all the basic church management bases, I'd love to give it a shot. I'll go ahead and start the product donation process tonight.

Wow. I feel like someone who is just finding out that dreamhost.com provides free unlimited webhosting for non-profits/501(c)3 organizations. Our church has enjoyed free webhosting, email, etc for years thanks to them. Now we may enjoy a first-class online CRM system for free, too!

[Billy Cox]

Wow. I'm surprised that I didn't know this. If you really think it can cover all the basic church management bases, I'd love to give it a shot. I'll go ahead and start the product donation process tonight.

Wow. I feel like someone who is just finding out that dreamhost.com provides free unlimited webhosting for non-profits/501(c)3 organizations. Our church has enjoyed free webhosting, email, etc for years thanks to them. Now we may enjoy a first-class online CRM system for free, too!

Salesforce non-profit edition operates on a different paradigm than most church management software. You will get the most value by customizing the system to support your organization. I'm curious as to what customizations are included with the non-profit edition.