As you may know, we've been watching Cliff Guy and Resurrection's ChMS journey and decision making process.

Well, in case you missed it, this month the team at Resurrection managed to come to a conclusion.  After presenting his recommendation, management agreed and they decided on Arena.

I've heard good things about Arena recently, but I can't comment on it too much since I have no experience with it.  However, if anyone else would like to chime in about it or any other ChMS, feel free to comment below, or drop me a line.

Over the last several months, Clif Guy of The Appian Way has been documenting bits and pieces of The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection's journey towards finding a new ChMS to handle their needs. As part of their IT and Web teams, Clif offers a lot of interesting insight and commentary on the process of making a decision. They are a larger church, but many of the points he makes can be applied to any search.

They start off with the decision to move to a new ChMS, where he hits on one of the decisions on installations and types of ChMS's we wrote about earlier this month. As you can see, they are discussing their options against a set of products they are considering. There's no need to have everything you want narrowed down before you start looking, even if sometimes it does expand your search further. Besides, if you have a strict set of criteria going in, there's also the chance you won't be able to find anything that suits your needs.

Then Clif gets into discussing the goals they have for transitioning to a new system. As you can see, there isn't too much specific about it, yet is does put together ideas on what they want to accomplish. This may be most important of all, because it's helping provide focus for the leadership group that is making the decision about a new piece of software.

Later on, Clif gets into discussing the evaluation criteria they have for a ChMS, where they discuss different features and requirements they have. As you can see, he includes a number of other criteria besides features, like cost, reliability and the reputation of the selling company. After all, it's not much good to get even a great piece of software if the company isn't around a year or two later to support or upgrade it.

Lastly, Clif lets us in on the finalists they've chosen for their new ChMS. At this time, he hasn't brought up a final decision, but I'm sure it's coming soon.

Now, I'm not endorsing whatever ChMS Clif and the team at Resurrection chose to implement, but I wanted to provide an example of the process of the selection. And, if you notice the dates on Clif's posts, it's not a quick decision. They've been discussing this for over 2 months now. Don't be in a rush, or you might miss something.

Thanks Clif for documenting Resurrection's process! It's great insight for us all, especially if we've not been through a similar process before.

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.

After discussing different types of solutions, we look at another main decision that affects our choices: what we want it to do. In keeping with the car comparison, you probably wouldn't buy a Prius for off-roading or a Hummer for city driving, so why would you buy software that didn't fit what you do at your church?

Internal vs. External vs. Hybrid

When we're looking at ChMS, there are several different scopes we can implement them in.

If you're looking at managing a lot of sensitive data, like names, addresses, financial figures, attendance, nursery tracking, etc., then this is data that we want to keep internal. In fact, there are companies who specialize in these intranet applications. For those unfamiliar with the term intranet, it refers to a network with no access by those outside it, so people could not come into your system and view this sensitive data. Applications in this scope are great for in-house management and day-to-day runnings of the church, but they don't offer anything accessible outside the intranet setup.

If you're looking for a portal to the world for outreach, information, and community, then you're probably looking for an external solution. In some cases, we can use a Content Management System (CMS) for this information. However, these are general web site setups, and do not always support the needs of a church. Therefore, there are ChMS systems that specialize in these external system setups. Also, this is the scove where most software-as-a-service solutions will fall because of the insecurities involved in transferring and storing sensitive data off-site.

Lastly, there are solutions that provide the best of both worlds, with the external portal being shown to the world and the internal system being kept in-house. While users of the system then only have one piece of software to worry about and be familiar with, they often require customized solutions or advanced boxed solutions to ensure that security is set up properly.

This may be one of our most important questions to answer before selecting a ChMS, and it dictates what kind of solutions are available to your church.

Next time, we'll look at some of the key features we may want to look for in different ChMS systems.

Chosing a new software package is always a big deal. Whether you're a $5 billion dollar company or a 50 person church, there are important questions that need to be asked before you even begin looking at your options. It's important to know your needs, just like when you go into any other major purchase. I mean, you wouldn't go into a Ferrari dealer looking for a reasonably-priced and fuel-effiecient car, would you?

Let's start by looking at some of the different types of solutions that are available...

Software-as-a-Service vs. Boxed Solutions vs. Customized Solutions

Software-as-a-Service means that you don't pay for a physical product, but, as the name implies, you purchase a service where the provider takes care of the hosting, support, maintenance, upgrades and modifications of the system. This can be a great model if either your church doesn't have the resources or manpower to take care of these pieces itself, or if the service needed is so large and robust that it just doesn't make sense to have a team of people on staff dedicated to it. However, these solutions often have limited customizability because the same service is being offered to numerous clients.

Boxed solutions are physical products you can buy, but you must provide the host or computer on which the product will be installed and accessed. Support of the product will probably be limited, and upgrades or modifications may require additional purchases and installations. Depending on the software purchased, there may be different levels of customization possible. This can be a good solution if you want a more hands-on approach to your system, but will probably require one or more people dedicated to maintaining it.

Customized solutions come in all flavors, but will most likely be your most expensive alternatives. They can be created by outside consultants, or a team of developers can be hired on staff to create and maintain the solution. However, as the name implies, this solution can be completely customized to your needs.

Each situation likely has one or more solution that will work, but the important thing is to figure out which one works best for you and your church.

Next time, we'll continue or ChMS requrements discussion and look at the different scopes of ChMS packages.