Over the next several week the development team will be updating Community Center for Churches with several user interface changes to improve your experience using Community Center. The first set of changes will introduce the concept of an action gear and icon. The action gear and its icon will replace all of the current text based action links throughout the application. To invoke the gear icon, click the gear to reveal the available actions and links.  The development team will also start to slowly integrate action icons throughout the application, mainly in the left side navigation.

The development team at Community Center for Churches recently decided to simplify the Dashboard for all Community Center users. The improved Dashboard now features a "Pastor on Call" module. This module is updated from the Dashboard and allows an authorized user (Dashboard Administrator) to add details for a "Pastor on Call" schedule. You can indicate the pastor, the phone number, the time period and provide an optional link to an external website for instructions. The new "Pastor on Call" module can send an email or push alert when the "Pastor on Call" is changed or updated. Users can subscribe to this notification via Dashboard -> Notifications. The improved Dashboard will also feature a new module for displaying system-wide saved searches. Users can now indicate if a Save Search is accessible to all the users of Community Center. The "Pastor on Call" module replaces the "System Alerts" module on the Dashboard. Groups that were previously listed under "My CCC" are now listed as "My Groups" in the module box below "My CCC" and "Upcoming Birthdays."

The development team at Community Center for Churches is happy to announce the immediate release of Notifications for Community Center for Churches. This new sub-module application is available to all current customers for free and will be available to new customers based on their selected subscription plan. As someone who loves technology, I was disappointed that I couldn't immediately create a native iPhone/iPod Touch application for Community Center. The barriers of entry to the App store and the cost of development have caused me to shelve that idea for now. However, I was ecstatic when Notifo for iPhone was released. It was created by a developer who used to work for Twitter (a micro-blogging site) as he wanted a way to send push alerts for anything to smart phones (iPhone, Blackberry, Palm). He started with an iPhone client, and I realized most (actually all but two) of my current clients have iPhones. This immediately gave me an idea. While I couldn't build a native iPhone app, I could use his software to send push alerts to a user's iPhone. 

Notifications aren't anything special--they are just simple, short alerts. An example of the power of a notification is when our credit card company calls or emails us when a suspicious charge appears on our credit card. It's sort of like an early warning system: it alerts us that something might be wrong or may require our attention. It's this aspect, the early warning system, that I wanted to incorporate into Community Center. I started by contacting a couple of customers and asked a question: "If Community Center could tell you something, what would you want it to tell you?" I spent a week hearing back from customers and got to work building a notifications sub-module. I collected the feedback I received and added some notifications of my own. Community Center now has over 40 notifications. The problem with creating a notification system is that it might feel like Community Center is spamming you with information that you can't act on, so that's why we built in the ability for you to customize the alerts you want Community Center to send you.

 

For me, there are six major areas that I wanted to be notified about:

• Prayer requests & Pastoral notes. Community Center sends notifications anytime anyone adds a pastoral note or a prayer request. I find that receiving prayer requests helps me pause and go before God on behalf of someone else, which is a helpful reminder that we are all dependent on Him and each other for our well-being.
• Lapsed Givers. Every day, Community Center prepares a report of givers who have stopped giving or haven't given in the past 120 days. As I've been transitioning into my role as Associate Pastor at the Vineyard, one of the early indicators that something has changed with a congregant is their giving patterns. Community Center goes beyond just reporting the lapsed giver. It averages the length between the congregant's gifts and gives you a report of their overall giving so that you can apply your own intelligence to the information you are receiving before acting on it. In a later blog post, I'll tell you how I use this information in my interaction with congregants. A note:Community Center doesn't report the size of the gifts, just the frequency and average time between gifts. You can use this information without knowing exactly how much money an individual  has given.
• Lapsed Attenders. Every day, Community Center prepares a report of attenders who have participated in the life of the church in the past 90 days. It's my belief that people who are disaffected or are leaving the church follow a pattern: if they gave, they stopped giving; if they participated in ministries or small groups, they stop participating. I desperately wanted an early warning system to alert me that something is wrong and may require my attention. And that's exactly what I've built into Community Center. It acts as a set of tools to give pastors information they need to make wise decisions about the care and well-being of their congregations, whether the congregation has 100 or 1000 attenders. As a pastor, I need to know where I should spend my time, and at least a portion of my time should be dedicated to the well-being of my congregation.
• Tasks. Anytime a task is assigned to me, Community Center notifies me. If a task I've assigned is completed or deleted, Community Center notifies me. This kind of simple accountability ensures that the work I am delegating to others or the work that's been delegated to me is being completed and not ignored. Also, Community Center sends a daily list of tasks that are due and can be configured to send a reminder when a task is due, ensuring that you never miss an appointment, call, or follow-up with a congregant. I'm finding that this is my new favorite feature of Community Center.
• Budget management. If you use Community Center to help keep track of your expenses and budgets, you can be notified when an expense is submitted to a budget under your supervision/control. This is useful information that helps me be a good steward with the resources that have been entrusted to me within the church.
• Profile changes. Because Community Center is web-based, it is also decentralized, so having notifications sent when a member status changes or when someone become inactive is helpful to ensure the integrity of your church database. And depending on the change, it might give you a pastoral care opportunity.

Notifications for Community Center is already installed and available to you and your staff team. Get started by clicking on "Dashboard" then "Notifications" and configure your notifications settings. It's that simple! If your Notifications for Community Center isn't available, please contact the Help Desk in Community Center and request that your Notifications for Community Center be activated.

 

The development team at Community Center for Churches is happy to announce the immediate release of an In/Out Board within Community Center for Churches. This new sub-module application is available to all current beta customers for free and will be available to new customers based on their selected subscription plan. The In/Out Board is a simple, yet powerful addition to Community Center for Churches. Having the In/Out Board within Community Center for Churches makes locating co-workers easy by providing a single place to display the working status of every employee, whether that individual is working from home or in the office.

 

At the Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor, we have used a similar In/Out Board for over 10 years allowing us to manage staff working from multiple work locations or sites, including employees who only work from home. Having access to a single location that provides the working status of every employee has reduced staff miscommunications and interpersonal issues, prevented missed or late appointments, and increased the confidence of the administrative staff. Here are a few benefits of having an active In/Out Board for you and your staff team:

• Pastoral Care. When a congregant calls to speak with one of your staff members (especially a member of your pastoral team), they expect you to know the current status of the team member: where he or she currently is, when he or she will return, and how to get a hold of him or her right now. Congregants have come to expect this level of responsiveness, especially if they have an important or urgent issue  that only your pastoral staff can handle.

• Management. Managers should know the current status of their staff members at all times. Managers typically know team member schedules and have some facts on time and attendance, but knowing real-time status is much more challenging. A manager without this information cannot effectively make real-time decisions on resource utilization or plan meetings, nor can he or she answer simple inquiries like "When will Jamie be back?"

• Team Collaboration. Churches that have a high degree of collaboration or interdependence within their workforce rely on In/Out Boards to prevent delays and inefficiencies in their day-to-day processes. If one of your staff members needs a quick answer from another team member to complete a task, the task stalls until they connect. Cell phones and pagers are certainly valuable here, but what happens when they are not available, out of range, or turned off? What happens when the team member is in an important meeting and should not be interrupted?

The In/Out Board is already installed and available to you and your staff team. Get started by clicking on "Dashboard" and "In/Out Board." Then click "Update your status" to enter your current work status. It's that simple! If your In/Out Board link isn't available, please contact the Help Desk in Community Center and request that your In/Out Board be activated.

I took over our small group ministry at the Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor in the spring of 2009, and one of the first things I decided to do was reach out to the small group leaders on a pastoral level. I'm a functional leader - you have an assignment, and it's your responsibility to manage it and ask up-line for what you need to get your job done. My wife is a relational leader - she wants to make sure your well-being is cared for in addition to the completion of your assignment. Though we both ultimately want the task completed, somehow, it's different. To address the difference, I came up with a plan: schedule a 15-minute call with each small group leader (primary and co-leader) and ask three questions during our conversation. I took notes and logged everything into Community Center. The initial round of calls took place between May and September of 2009, and the average call lasted 22 minutes. The three questions I asked were as follows: 1.) How are you doing personally, spiritually, relationally?

• During this question I would listen for themes, reflect back to the leader what I heard, and translate those reflections into prayer requests. I find that a lot of people are uncomfortable asking for prayer - it seems selfish and greedy. By actively listening and generating a list of prayer needs, I found it was easier for them to offer other prayer requests when I asked my next question.

2.) How can I be praying for you specifically?

• Any prayer requests were added to Community Center. As a follow-up question, I also asked if I could share their requests with our prayer ministry team. However, everything  I input about my calls is automatically accessible to the pastoral team through Community Center because I have chosen to make my notes available to them.

3.) Is there anything that you need to tell me or would like to tell me that you haven’t had an opportunity or haven’t been given permission to tell me?

• This was the most important question that I asked during my first round of calls. It gave permission to the leaders to share difficult or negative feedback, mainly because I asked for it. My fear about this question was that I was going to invite a series of complaints, but asking this question gave the pastoral team  insight into a common theme that leaders were experiencing and helped make a case for the need to do more pastoral care across the board for our leadership team, not only for small group leaders.

I started these calls in May 2009, and almost immediately, I felt like this was something important for us as a church to be doing. The leaders that I talked to were very surprised and appreciative that I took time out of my schedule to check in on them. Many were downright giddy to receive a personal call from the pastor who wasn't just responding to an articulated need. Since then, I've invited our entire pastoral team to join me, bringing our total reach to 82 thrice-yearly calls. We use Community Center for Churches to help us make LeaderCare assignments and to capture the results of our calls.

Community Center for Churches acts as a repository for the results of our calls and ensures that every leader receives a pastoral-care call throughout the calendar year. Every pastor on the team is assigned a group of leaders and uses Community Center to report the results of their calls. The tool also provides one-click access to view which leaders are still waiting for a pastoral-care call in any given reporting period. One of the most important things I learned managing a 16 million dollar quota at IBM was the importance of 360 - never work with blinders on. Without blinders, you are much more aware of all that is around you. If you reach out to a customer, you need to log your communications so that you can share the wealth of your conversation with your team and ensure that the customer is receiving all of the care they require. Pastors usually do a great job of keeping track of the important details related to their interactions with congregants and leaders; however, most of that is information is stored with the individual pastor. Community Center makes it easy to distribute that information securely and confidentially to a team you select. With built-in access control, only the notes you want to share are shared, enabling others on the team to benefit from your effort and care. Community Center for Churches: helping you better care for and love your congregation.

I created Community Center for Churches (CCC) because I wanted a better tool to help me be a better pastor. I'm a functional leader, I like processes, data, graphs, and systems.  But I was still struggling with my craft as a pastor, so I searched for a tool that would help me merge my love of processes with the need for relational care. Not finding what I was looking for, I decided to build my own tool and then I invited others to see if they liked it too. CCC was built by two active and working pastors. We were both trained as software developers and worked for years in corporate environments before becoming pastors.  We started our development by inviting five churches to help us test and validate our design assumptions.

The product has developed and evolved because we tested it in real churches with real pastors trying to solve everyday problems. CCC delivers the specific tools pastors need to help them better care for and love their congregants. It delivers tools that staff, leaders and key members need to accomplish administrative tasks quickly and efficiently, sharing the load, so that time can be  focused on caring for congregants and guests.

We've found that the more you use CCC's integrated modules, the more you put your data to work for you, creating "living" profiles of your church that allow you to make adjustments quickly, keeping your programs on track and more accurately planning for your church's future. Learn more about Community Center for Churches and how it can help you better care for and love your congregation at http://getcommunitycenter.com/