Part III: Rquirements of A Church Management System (ChMS)

Now that we know what kinds of systems and setups are available, we need to start wading through feature sets to figure out what best suits your church. Instead of going through each package individually, let's just take a look at some of the features you may want to consider for your ChMS:

Main Website

A good ChMS should always provide you with a high-quality website to represent your church to the rest of the world on the internet. It should be easily navigable for a first time visitor, and include all the basic key information, like addresses, contacts, service times and directions for your church.

Blog

If you have a tech-savvy pastor, or one who just likes to share their thoughts with the world, then a blog may be suitable for your church.

Podcasts

If you are looking to take the next step towards uber-geekiness for your church site, then you might want a ChMS and website that can support podcasts, which would allow you to distribute all your services or any other audio or video media to the internet. Just beware of the numerous copyright issues that can become involved in this kind of media.

Scheduling

A good scheduling application can be indispensable, especially if you've seemingly got more going on at your church than there are time and places to hold them. If it can be an integrated part of your website, then keeping your congregation notified of what's going on becomes that much easier.

Web-based E-mail

A great feature that can help better organize your church staff communication if you don't already have another solution like Outlook Web Access or Gmail for Organizations.

Internal Operations

I know I'm using a bit of a catch-all here, but you may want to handle some of your internal operations with your ChMS, like attendance, tithing/finances, daycare check-in/check-out and many other activities.

As you can quickly see with this short list, there are a number of different ChMS features that can be useful to different organizations in different situations. Take the time to figure out which feature set works best for your church. Try not to get caught up in what you can do with your ChMS, but focus on what you likely will do with it.