Church Tech Tools

When people think about Church tech they tend to think about Audio/Video and the tech used by the production team on service days. Church’s are managed seven days a week by the Senior Pastors, Admin, Ministry leads, and in some cases a board of directors. This post is about the tech tools that can make church management more productive and efficient.   Two main areas that can benefit from tech tools are internal communications and task tracking.  Let’s cover a couple tools that can help in both areas.

Internal Communications:

The tool I see most used is actually the least effective for managing the church and that is GroupMe.  Let look into why this tool is so popular with churches.

• It’s free.
• It’s pretty easy to use.
• It’s been used at my previous church.

GroupMe is fine for non-management chats and interactions because of the above reasons. But it lacks a number of features I think are needed for internal communication regarding church management.  So what are some other tools that have more features than GroupMe?  Two tools I am going to compare with GroupMe are MS Teams and Slack.  Google Chat is also an option.

MS Teams, Slack features GroupMe does not have.

• Privacy Options – control who can share your profile.
• Mac app
• Search
• Group Voice Chat
• Group Video Chat
• Two-Way Video Chat
• Schedule send Message
• Integration with other apps such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Zoom, Trello, Twitter, Dropbox, and Outlook to name a few.

Benefits:

• You don’t have multiple zoom accounts to have multiple video chats going on.
• When a chat is not effective you can just start a video call
• You can share files via multiple methods and tools
• More robust communications

What about costs?

GroupMe is free and MS Teams and Slack have paid versions that may be required to get the extra features. The good news is both MS Teams and Slack provide their tools free to certified non-profits.

Task/ Project Management

The one area I consistently see that needs improvement is church task and project management. As most Pastors don’t come from a corporate background putting tasks and projects into a visual makes it easier for them to understand the status of a project or task at a quick glance. 

One tool I use for tasks in general but it also suitable for church and task management is Trello.  It uses the concept of Kaban board with lists that reflect the status of a project(s). It’s very customizable and provides the overall status of tasks in a project at  glance.  Best thing is it runs pretty much all platforms. 

Below is a sample project in Trello. Notice the lists are setup as follows:

• To-Do Items
• Scheduled Items 
• Tasks that are in-progress 
• Tasks That have been completed

Other Features:

• Integration with other sites such as gmail, MS teams, Slack  to name a few.
• Provides the concept of PowerUps that add functionality directly to Trello. 
• There are numerous templates you can use depending on your project. 

How much does it cost?

Trello has a free option as well as paid depending on your needs. Non-Profits can get up to 75% off if you need the functionality of a paid version. 

In this post we have provided an initial set of tools to improve Church internal communication and Project Management. The good news is you start out with free versions to try out and define your standard operating procedures for using them.