Arena vs. Fellowship One vs. Church Community Builder??

[Eric Echols]

We are taking a look at different church database solutions. We've checked out Arena, F1, & CCB.
I would love to get your feedback. What system do you use? Do you like it?
In regards to check-in do you use key fobs? Do you like them?

[Eric Echols]

We are using a new database that is "coming soon" by Think Ministry Inc.
It's called Ministry Platform. So far we love it. It's very intuitive, allows for easy navigation, & check-in works like a charm. www.thinkministry.com

[Frank Tan]

We're using ACS as our church database, and when we added a check-in system, it was a no-brainer to go with Checkpoint from ACS. This way, we don't have to duplicate efforts in terms of record database keeping. So in that sense, it's working out well. However, ACS interface does leave a lot to desire. I wish it was more intuitive. But most of our volunteers are getting the hang of it, and parents are okay with it right now.

We use LRS for our paging system.

[Kirk Morgan]

We use F1. The features are cool in theory but not very user friendly. We are too commited now to pull out though... We use the key tag sytem and it works pretty well. (Except when the F1 server crashes)

[Steve Paglia]

We use Parent Pager and find it great - there is no match for it, at least for the parts of it that are important for us.
Brad Hennessy mentioned a few hurdles - those are true if you want something real easy and not robust. However, it's overall cost and expense in hardware isn't much different at all than from most other check-in systems, and unlike the Web based systems that require a monthly or yearly fee, once you own parent pager it's yours, and it comes out costing far far less than subscription services.
We especially like that it uses photo recognition rather than random numbers - we can get to know our people much better that way.
Also, only Parent pager puts a real-time photo roster on screen in each classroom, and a teacher can page a parent directly from the screen in the room, as well as add notes or incidents about the student.
We handle 500 check-ins a weekend with it and it serves us very well. There is also technical support available when you need it - if you need it - on sunday morning!

[Steve Paglia]

We also use F-1 for the church database, but not for check-in - it was too expensive and short on features. We are also looking to replace F-1.
Has anyone used Connection Power? It seems to be much more process and people based, instead of just "data".

[Tom Roepke]

we have been using ccb for almost two years and really enjoy it. we invested in it first for the check-in feature. We've watched the features of ccb grow, i.e.online registrations, rss feed group info and a very dynamic calendar. they are a good bunch and have we have been grateful for the ongoing commitment to meet our needs as they continue to keep the program on the cutting edge. i think for the cost and utility it is the best product out there. their support team is excellent.

the only down side to any of these data systems is the addition of another network that our "customers" have to manage (i.e. fb) to interact with. my background is in fund development and i think the financial piece is excellent. managing data in the church is a difficult task. there are many silos that get developed if you don't have a system like ccb. having used programs like donor perfect and blackbaud to manage non-profits with millions of dollars in income, doing our research we found ccb to be the best single tool to address the issues of donor tracking, relationship managing, financial processing and children security.

and... we don't use fobs, would like too.

[Norm Rasmussen]

We evaluated systems about 3 years ago and came up with the following ideas: Almost all of our criteria then are valid today.

1. Limited internal IT budget meant we weren't going to go with a SQL based in-house system. We interviewed several churches doing internal server based systems and found that the larger ones who had over 1500 attending on a weekend all had significant investments in IT staff and servers in-house. We felt like that was not in our budget for the foreseeable future because we were heavily investing in pastoral staff for growth and would not have a large IT budget for several years.
2. We therefore decided to look at systems that were SAAS (Software as a service) based. We looked at several and narrowed it down to 3: Fellowship One, Connection Power, and CCB. I will give my eval of those later.
3. We decided that we needed a system that would allow us to have as many lay leaders and volunteers helping with it as could be possible in order to maximize our admin time in the office supporting the ministries. We wanted to be able to push some data management functions down to volunteers if possible.
4. We already had at that point and continue to have a fairly well-defined set of working processes and methods that we use for assimilation, equipping and for discipleship. We weren't really looking for tools to help us develop process and methods. We were looking for a database system that would allow us to automate and expand our already defined set of processes in order to do them to more people with less falling through the cracks.
5. At that point, we thought it would be nice to have a system that would help us with a web content management and updating slowdown we had experienced. We had a stale website then and felt like it was too hard to update and work with, and having volunteers work on it was making it difficult to get things updated in a timely fashion.

So - with that in mind, we narrowed it down to F1, ConnectionPower, and CCB.

Here's our take on the three:
F1: Pro: We all loved the power that F1 seemed to have and the stories of successful, large churches were amazing as we went through the demonstration. We really liked the check in system for F1 and the person who did the demo for us was a small group leader who showed us how it helped develop their people by using their system.
F1: Con: The Price was the first drawback. We did not expect it to cost as much as it does. The second was the price as we asked about pushing it out to dozens of our lay leaders and 2nd and 3rd tier workers. Since they were priced based on licensed logins, it kept getting bigger and bigger as we dreamed about all the people who could use such a system. Seemed to us that F1 wanted us to keep it in the office and not push it out based on their pricing model. The next con was that it didn't seem that F1 had a lot of tools to help us develop interactivity of our groups. At that time, we also thought we wanted something that would drive Web content, which F1 did not do. Even a basic central calendar was not available at that time, so we would have had to budget for additional web development. We estimated that F1 plus the web development would have cost us over $60k the first year. We also got a little bit of a sense that we would love F1 IF we did church like Fellowship Church does it, but may not love it as much if we didn't.

Connection Power: Pro: We liked a lot about the connection power product. The people who were using it fully seemed to be doing well and actually doing a decent job of processing people in their church. The sales people we talked with had a good feel for developing working processes in assimilation and growing a church. The modules seemed well thought out and written. The company was stable and seemed to have plenty of established clients.

Connection Power: Cons: What we found after spending quite a bit of time with the product and churches that were using it was that there was not nearly enough flexibility in Connection Power for us to use the tool in support of our already defined set of assimilation processes and equipping tracks. Connection power seemed to be written by a group of church growth people with the idea that they would bring a "best practices" approach to the system and you were to go along with their system of "best practices" in order to use the product. Anything done OTHER than those pre-defined processes that Connection Power had developed was considered "customizing" and we did not get the idea from talking with other churches and with them that it was easy to make a change or get a change made.

CCB: Pros: We felt like CCB seemed to have the most flexibility in terms of how open-ended the tools were. There didn't seem to be a limit on what types of processes we could develop or any limit on how many people we involved in them. We thought at the time that the group functions in CCB would let us develop some dynamic Web content to push up to the main web site. We also thought the check in system would meet our needs, although we liked F1's better. We loved the way CCB allowed us to create an internal web presence for each of our groups of people, large or small and to push out to lay group leaders the ability to have a group calendar, group forums. We also had been paying for a 3rd party resource scheduling package for our facility and thought that the CCB resource management tool tied to each groups' calendar requests would work for us. We really liked the CCB Forms development tool and the ease that all sorts of people could build those for sign-ups, trips, polls, questionnaires, etc.

CCB Cons: We thought CCB seemed to be the most "clunky" of the applications, with the query tool being a bit hard to understand. We also felt like that CCB may be a bit harder to implement because it was so wide open and maybe not as sophisticated. We did not like the limited design templates that CCB offered at the time for web content management.

After looking at all three and interviewing about 20-30 churches, we settled on CCB. We have been actively using it now for about 30 months and have found it to be fantastic. We are actively tracking about 8000 people in our database (over 20k in the database, but 8000 who have attended at least once in the past year) as we take attendance at numerous events, including Weekend Celebration services. We have developed people processing queues for First time visitors, for people who were active, but have stopped coming, for assimilation, equipping and for follow up as well as for simple tasks like following up youth and children sign-ups for events. We have developed hundreds of web forms for sign ups and questionnaires. We have a working central calendar and each small group has their own internal web site that logged in users can interact with. We track giving, attendance, assimilation status and have begun to use the position to giftedness "matchmaking" module in CCB to help match people to potential service opportunities.

We have been using the check-in system for children since the summer of 2007 now and have worked through issues and feel great about how quickly we can process several hundred kids securely.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them. I've got a lot of stories about how we evaluated and how we've successfully used the tools to build a great system.

On Key Fobs: So far we've not put these in. We have felt that we want our first time visitors to have the same experience as our long-time parents, so maybe we'll change that, but philosophically, we've not wanted it to feel any different being a first timer.

Norm Rasmussen - Vineyard Church, KC North

[Steve Drechsler]

Hi Norm,

I'm the sales dude, "small group leader”, who showed you Fellowship One. I loved working with your team and I’m glad to know things are going well for you all. I was thrilled to see your thoughts regarding the three systems you evaluated. Thanks for your insight. If you ever want to catch up regarding some of the new and exciting stuff we're doing now just drop me a note. I am glad your decision to go to CCB has been a blessed one!

I want to take a moment to address a few points for all the folks reading this thread:
1. The PRICE of Fellowship One is indeed higher than the two other ChMS solutions you evaluated. After doing many TCO, Total Cost of Ownership, evaluations with churches of varying sizes, I am confident that the COST of Fellowship One is in line or cheaper than most of our competitors. When you consider the cost of I.T. Infrastructure , web integration and man hours, the TCO can often times be lower overall for Fellowship One.
2. We encourage getting Fellowship One in the hands of all the people who need it. Our pricing is based on the edition that best fits your needs, not on licensed users.
3. We've had Group Manager/Finder for years but I realize that it may not have the collaborative features you want if your looking for a social media tool. We've since created a new groups environment that will continue to grow and meet the needs of most church’s group environment. Since the majority of people are using Facebook over any church-based application, we allow our partners to interface with Facebook via our RESTful API.
4. We do not provide content management for websites but we do drive web activity through our WebLink features. Integrated features include: on-line giving, registrations, groups, contacts, relationship manager and volunteer applications.
5. We do not provide a calendar. Over the last 5 years the trend for websites is to allow people to find relevant events based on areas of interest. For example, if I'm a soon-to-be parent, I would go to a children's or married’s/parenting landing page as opposed to looking through 31 boxes on a calendar. Finding the right group will be easier if I know what kind I want before I look for when they meet.
6. Of the nearly 1,400 church partners we have, Fellowship Church in Grapevine, TX is one of them. The Fellowship One software has been developed over the last five years to fit a variety of church styles and ministry needs. While our roots started at Fellowship Church, the software has grown to include a wide variety of church types. We take a very consultative approach to delivery to find out what you’re doing, then we build out Fellowship One to support your ministries.

I pray for continued blessings for you and your church. Please let me know if there is anything that I or Fellowship Technologies can do to serve you.

[Mike Stroven]

Hmm... Has anyone looked at the ChurchInfo project? http://www.churchdb.org I'm really trying to find the right fit to go along with our Joomla/CommunityBuilder website, that would give us a more polished interface...