Where we’re at

Over a year ago I wrote a post on how we track benevolence gifts at New Covenant. It was a great first start for us.

We are now using a new system developed by Voracity Solutions that is integrated into our Arena ChMS system.

The Benevolence module in a brief summary allows the following:

The first part of redesigning our site required that we think through what it would encompass and defining the requirements. We looked at a few things including:

1. Defining what we do well as a church.
2. Defining who we are.
   “ We are a grace-oriented, Bible church that seeks to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ”
3. Narrowing down our target audience / who we serve. (warning this is very generalized for the sake of simplicity”.

   ”We serve middle-aged families. The husband works at Rockwell and the wife is a stay-at-home mom with three children. They shop at Kohl’s, Target, and Hy-Vee. They live in Hiawatha or Cedar Rapids and their children are in the Linn-Mar or Cedar Rapids school district.:

4. Defining where we want to go. What’s the win?
   ”We want to have a web site that is accurate, up-to-date and is able to scale to serve the needs of our growing church family. It needs to accommodate the needs of multiple worship venues, our capital campaign and our building/relocation project. We want all event sign-up and payments to be done online.”

We then defined what the objectives would be for our team. These needed to be defined very clearly to enable us to stay on target.

i) We want to position ourselves for relocation and growth

ii) We want to provide self-service features that connect people to ministry and groups

iii) We want to provide accurate, up-to-date information that is easy to locate

iv) We want to minimize site maintenance

v) We want to reduce the clutter in order to maximize our impact – less is more

vi) We want our web site to be an extension of our brand/ministry

vii) We want the web site to be the primary place of communication and promotion

viii) We want the user of our web site to be in control of their online interaction/experience with the ability to push content to those who request it

We then looked at what was currently working for us on our current site. This included things like:

1. Streaming Media
2. Iconic home page promotions
3. Calendar
4. Unique design

We then defined what was not working on our current website, our current hurdles that were keeping us from completing the project – and how we would over come them – as well as our current assets we have to make the project a reality.

Up next: Creating a content map.

Wow! The year went fast. I cannot belive 2009 is gone already and we are almost a month in to 2010!

The past few months have been super busy for us at NCBC. We are in the middle of many projects and are making great headway. As I look a head to 2010 I see the following projects that are a priority for our ministries.

1. Finish our new church website powered by the Arena ChMS system and designed by Voracity Solutions. We are excited to be able to offer our church online giving, event registrations, and an over all richer website experience. I cannot wait to be able to share more about our process with Voracity, and how it is working after we launch! If you an Arena customer and have not yet made a external website based on their system – you are missing out!

2. Work on our finalizing many different processes at NCBC. We have been working hard at documenting how we do things that make NCBC unique such as our First Time Guest Process & Following up, our Communications Work Flow for promoting and request events, as well as how we handle new Attenders in our database and members.

3. Work on our budget. We are about ready to start having meetings to discuss our budget proposals. This is one aspect of my job that really gets me going! I love planning and budgeting. This processes allows me to see what our different ministries are dreaming for the upcoming year and gives me the knowledge neccessary to think about how we can support them with IT & Communications initiatives.

4. Metrics – or better known as data mining. Drawing conclusions and tracking information in our database and giving our leadership monthly reports on some specific statistics such as the number of people serving, average contribution, number of contributors, etc – and working to automate this in the Arena system.

5. New Facility Planning- Back in October ( I think) our church voted to start construction of our new facility about 10 minutes a way from our current one. This is not just an addition of a building – we will be completely re-locating and selling our current facility. We have started to plan and research phone systems, infrastructure, and many other things as well as assembling bids from companies.

Overall I am excited about the challenges that lie a head for the next year and cannot wait to see what God will accomplish.

We have been able to send SMS / Text messages in Arena for a while now- but we thought it was missing one critical component. The ability to receive replies to SMS messages was a critical component for our team. We could not stand the thought of some one replying back to one of our messages and not receiving it.

We worked with Voracity Solutions to have them develop a Two-Way SMS provider that would integrate into our Arena system- and they did a great job!

The user interface is well designed and takes advantage of components already integrated into Arena. The agent also sends email notifications when a new SMS is received.

If your church might be interested in this module contact Voracity Solutions for more information.

Here at New Covenant we had the privilege of beta testing Voracity Solutions new Mobile Membership software for the ArenaChMS product.

Mobile Membership is an enhancement to the current Arena Mobile Modules and is a great add-on to Arena for any church that would like to take there database with them on there cell phone.

We worked with Voracity to make sure the modules would all work properly on Windows Mobile devices, as well as iPhone and Palm devices.

Voracity has made the system very easy to update – by using their Control Panel to perform the initial install, as well as all future updates. The Control Panel detects what version of Arena you are using and makes sure Mobile Membership is updated to work it.

You can learn more about Voracity Solutions as well as there Mobile Membership product by visiting there website- www.voracitysolutions.com

Some people have asked for the code used to generate Birthdays, Anniversaries, and Employment Anniversaries in the Report Grid for Query Arena module on our intranet. Below is the SQL code for each module we have added to the page.

Staff Birthday’s

select DAY(birth_date) as 'Birth Date','<a href="default.aspx?page=7&person='+CONVERT(VARCHAR(20),cp.person_id)+'">'+cp.nick_name+' '+cp.last_name+'</a>' AS 'Staff Member'

from core_person as CP

where MONTH(birth_date) = MONTH (GETDATE()) and staff_member = 1

order by DAY(birth_date), last_name asc

Staff Anniversaries

select DAY(anniversary_date) as 'Anniversary Date','<a href="default.aspx?page=7&person='+CONVERT(VARCHAR(20),cp.person_id)+'">'+cp.nick_name+' '+cp.last_name+'</a>' AS 'Staff Member'

from core_person as CP

where MONTH(anniversary_date) = MONTH (GETDATE()) and staff_member = 1

order by DAY(anniversary_date), last_name asc

Staff Employment Anniversaries

(this code works in Shelby V5 and assumes you are using V5 payroll for Employment Information)

Use ShelbyDB

SELECT 

DateDiff(yy, HireDate, GetDate()) as "Years On Staff",

NA.Salutation + ' ' + NA.LastName AS Name

, HD.Descr AS Department

FROM Shelby.NaNames NA

 INNER JOIN Shelby.PREmp PR ON NA.NameCounter = PR.NameCounter

 LEFT OUTER JOIN Shelby.PRHomeDept HD ON HD.Counter = PR.HomeDeptCounter

 LEFT OUTER JOIN Shelby.NAAddresses Adr ON Adr.AddressCounter = NA.MainAddress

 LEFT OUTER JOIN Shelby.NAPhones PH ON PH.NameCounter = NA.NameCounter AND PH.PhoneCounter = 1

 LEFT OUTER JOIN Shelby.NAPhones MO ON MO.NameCounter = NA.NameCounter AND MO.PhoneCounter = 5

WHERE CoNu = 1

 AND Status = 'A'

 AND Month(HireDate) = CASE WHEN Month(GetDate()) = 12 THEN 1 ELSE Month(GetDate())  END

ORDER BY "Years On Staff" Desc, Name

You just need to make sure you add the Report Grid for Query Module to your page, then copy and paste the SQL code into the module.

Using the Arena “Dockable Modules” module we have been developing our intranet. One of our desires was to be able to push data Staff Anniversaries, Birthdays as well as Employment Anniversaries for the current month to our staff home page.

We were able to do the Birthdays and Anniversaries fairly simply by using the Report Grid from Query module-

The Employment Anniversaries were a bit tricky as we do not track HR information in Arena – it is stored with in Shelby’s Payroll module. Thankfully the Arena Report Grid module allows you to connect to another database to pull information- so we wrote a stored procedure to grab the information from Shelby.

Now our staff can go to our Arena Home Page, and add the additional modules they wish to access.

We plan to add some additional report grids in the future for upcoming events, etc – but this is working well for us so far.