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Today we're wrapping up a four day interview with Boyd Pelley. Boyd created Churchteams.com, a web-based analytic tool for small group ministries. It has become so much more. This is a tool that will not only enhance your small group ministry, it will make your church much more efficient and effective.
Rick: We've talked a lot about using Churchteams.com for analysis, what are some other benefits of churchteams?
Boyd: Well communication is huge. A church can text and email as well as send postcards and letters to the whole church, any group, set of groups or set of members with just a few clicks. It's really easy. Imagine a bad weather day being able to send an email or even text message to everyone in the church that a service is canceled from the pastor's home computer. Or what about a last minute change of plans for a small group where even email is too slow and text messaging is needed. You can imagine how much our student ministries love texting.
In addition, so many people have enjoyed Churchteams for small groups and they wanted us to expand it to be a full database. So we did that a couple of years ago. Now you can track membership, assimilation, contributions, children's check-in, recruitment, reporting, event sign ups and anything else a traditional Church Management System does. The only exceptions are accounting and calendaring. There are some great reasons we've not done these, but anything membership related, we can do. By the way, all for the same price. No extra cost for modules or training or support. It's all included.
Rick: So it does track contributions?
Boyd: Yes. Besides the obvious reason of needing to track individual contributions for tax statements, we wanted to include giving as one of the factors involved in evaluating spiritual growth. We're working on some innovative ideas on how to do this, but I'll save that for later.
Rick: Will Churchteams.com work for a church of 50?
Boyd: Yes. It will. Not just for small groups, but everything related to church membership including contributions. Small churches sometimes don't think they need a church database, but in reality web-based software makes it possible for any volunteer to help with whatever role they have to help with the church. This can be a tremendous help even for church plants with nothing more than a core team getting ready to launch.
Rick: Will it work for a church of 20,000?
Boyd: Four of the largest ten churches in the United States use Churchteams for their small groups. We don't yet have any churches running over 2,000 using it for a full database. But, I imagine that day will come in the next couple of years. In August, we had one church put 2,600 people in small groups using Churchteams.
Rick: Boyd, tell us about the cost. What can you tell church leaders about the cost of Churchteams.com?
Boyd: I managed a church budget for six years as the church administrator. I know church finances feel tight whether the budget is $12,000 or $12 million. A big church might have a $5 million budget. That would be a very small business. We wanted our pricing to enable the best stewardship possible for churches not reflect typical business pricing. So, for most of a decade we built the tool as a labor of love essentially front-ending development costs. That allows us to provide the highest possible quality tool for an incredibly reasonable price about 10-40% of other comparable web-based solutions. Here's a link to our prices. If any or your readers are interested, please invite them to join me for a webinar. I do like 5 a week.