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:

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.

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.

One thing I have been thinking a lot about lately is how we are tracking people by member status is our database.

We use the following member statuses:

Member: Active Voting – anyone who has taken our membership class and actively attends a worship service and / or is actively giving.

Member: Inactive Voting – anyone who has gone to membership class and is no longer meats the criteria above. (to the best of our knowledge)

Attender: – any one who actively attends a worship service.

Guest: Any one who has visited with us for a worship service on a Sunday and has filled out a communication card to let us know they came.

Non-Attender / Misc: Any one who is involved in a small group, Adult Bible Fellowship, attends an event, or is a parent of a child in our youth ministries and children’s ministries.

Minor: Any one under 18.

The problem we have is that we cannot tell the difference between some one who never attends our church and some one who is actively involved in a Small Group / ABF but just does not attend a worship service.

After talking with our “Database Queen” this last week- we are looking at making yet another membership status for this group of people as we find it is important to know the difference.

Does any one else have thoughts on this? Or a membership status name we can borrow?

UPDATE (6/3/2008)

A couple of people have asked how we gather the information we have talked about above. For worship service attendance- the only real way we know who is attending vs. who is not is if they fill out a “communication card” that is provided for them in their bulletin- or if they are giving. We have created a report that tells us who has given by particular services. When we process contributions into Arena we do a batch per service. The only loop hole currently in this process is any one who has given with ACH or Electronic Fund Transfer- as they are likely to get marked present for one of our five services.

We are also tracking many other activities which would allow you to be included in our Attendee Member Status- such as Youth Group Attendance, Adult Bible Fellowship Attendance, where and how often members are serving, as well as what events they have been going to and which ones they have registered for – but have not attended.

We have been trying to get online giving going for about six months now. We were recommended by one of our venders to use PDS / Money Gram as our provide since they had a partnership with them.

We tried this.

I am disappointed in the quality of service they have offered.

We have frequently called PDS / Money Gram and left voice mails- none of which have been returned.

We have received emails from the company- in which we have responded to them and then have also asked for some one to call us and follow up. This has not happened.

I would not the use of these two companies to any church or other organization. It looks good on paper- but you most likely will be disappointed.

This post is not meant to come down and accuse money gram or PDS of any wrong doing or anything- maybe we were just not a great fit for their company.

We will now begin to look at using another company to handle processing our online giving.

On Saturday we started our migration to Exchange 2007. So far everything is going well.

I have moved my mailbox over and have been enjoying the many new features of OWA.

I am now under the impression that we could almost uninstall Outlook from all of our client PCs and they could use OWA instead. I have yet to find a core feature it is missing.

This next week we plan to figure out what our certificate from GoDaddy is not “certified / trusted” for all browsers. I have a bad feeling we will need to get a different certificate. (what are others doing?)

We also plan to finalize out installation of ISA 2006 and switch away from 2004. This will allow us to publish our Exchange sever a bit differently and allow Outlook Any Where usage for our mobile users.

We also plan to look into switching away from Good Messaging for our Windows Mobile users and start using the built in active sync component.

I am excited to see the new possibilities we will have.

I am generally pretty good at trying new things. One of the things I have been staying away from trying over the last couple years was the Mac operating systems. I am very comfortable with the Windows system- so why learn Mac?

When I started at NCBC we had one Mac- and that use basically supported them self- and still does to this day.

We have never had a problem with the Mac- accept it does not like to print to printers with out post script. (We have a Lanier 232c- and we did not purchase post script for it- so it will not print in color)

It just so happened that one of our three Macs freed up last week- which gave me the ability to try to use one for a week or so.

The only frustration I have had so far is that I cannot use Fusion and run Windows since I am using a PowerBook G4 – with Leopard OS installed.

This should be an interesting experience- and I will try to blog along the way on what I learn.

I have been thinking a lot about the projects on the list for this next year and what we are currently testing. Currently the plans are to:

1. Switch the remaining staff over to Office 2007 in late May / early June

2. Move to Exchange 2007 in late June. ( we are currently testing this)

3. Possibly switch to Forefront security (currently we are testing it on our test domain)

4. Deploy terminal services web function from Server 2008 for staff wanting access to the network remotely.

5. Upgrade from ISA 2004 to ISA 2006 ( well more of a clean install- you cannot upgrade from ISA Standard to ISA 2006 Enterprise for some reason)

6. Implement a VLAN structure and deploy a campus wide public wireless network solution

7. Expand our current touch screen / deploy a finger print check-in solution.

8. Work with our communications team to design a new website in Shelby’s ArenaChMS product.

9. Enhance on monitoring of servers / critical network resources.

10. Investigate VOIP phone systems and come up with a solution for VOIP.

11. Deploy Live Communications Server for our instant messaging / presence solution.

12. Convert web / applications / and backup domain controllers over to VMware or Windows Virtual Server 2005 (any one have any strong opinions here?- I would like to discuss)

Well thats all the big plans for this next year- I am sure others will come up.

Comment if you would like to talk about what we have chosen to use for any of these projects or if you have any ideas on what to use.

With much anticipation we will launch check-in for our Nursery this comming Sunday. Our team as well as the team at Shelby Arena has put a bunch of work in getting this ready.

We will be able to check-in children by the last four digits of there home or cell phone number. The system will then print out three tags.

1. Parent tag- has a security code and child’s name on it so the parent can pick up the child.

2. Child tag- this tag will be placed on the child and will list allergy alerts, custody issues, medical alerts, as well as any notes we have on the child in the database. It will also list the parents pager number, child’s age, and parents names.

3. Diaper bag tag- This tag will be placed on the diaper bag and will not have the security code, but will have the parents and child’s name.

In the back of my head I cannot believe we are launching this the same day as our Wash campus officially begins.

I am confident all will go well with the first Sunday of computerized check-in.

This coming Saturday our Washington Campus will officially launch. We are the only multi campus Church in our city. This is a very exciting time in the life of our church and the opportunity it will give us to grow and have space for others.

The technology used to make this campus possible is incredible- we are using a 17ft x 10ft HI DEF screen as well as a Panasonic HD Projector, running 480p for the sermon.

Everything done at this campus is live, except the Sermon is a taped version of our 46th Street Campus the hour before.

We have about 45 minutes to get the sermon manually driven to our Wash Campus- and we do not do any editing- we just pray that all will travel well. (If not we also have the 8:00 AM service taped as a backup.

If you want to see some pictures of our soft launches you can see them here.