Overview Of SimpleChurch CRM

SimpleChurch CRM is divided into nine main areas:

1. Members
2. Groups
3. Interactions
4. Attendance
5. Reports
6. Utilities
7. Search
8. Settings
9. Permissions

Members are individuals in your organization, and they can be placed into one or many groups. They also can also be put into families with other members.

Groups are comprised of members, and they are a way to simply organize those members into sections which can then be mass-emailed or put into a ‘meeting’ to collect attendance.

Interactions are the contacts and communications your organization has had with a member. Some examples are: email, phone call, house call. You can define your own types. You can assign interactions to a member. For instance, after the visitor cards are collected on a Sunday, you can assign interactions to staff, Sunday School teachers, etc. to  complete. They will receive an email with the action to complete, the person’s name, and a summary of what is to take place. The interaction will be marked as outstanding until the assignee marks it as completed and adds a summary of the encounter. On a member’s page,  a list of all interactions to date is show. This helps you to see the type and quantity of contacts you’ve had with the member – people won’t get harassed or forgotten.

Attendance can be entered manually or easily by the use of RFID cards. Member can be given an inexpensive RFID card (which is credit card sized) which he/she can keep in their wallet or music folder. The member just has to wave the card (still in the wallet or folder even) over a reader which is connected to any computer running Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X, or Linux running the Reader application. The reader application will then log that person as present and display his/her name as a visual confirmation of their presence. The collected attendance data shows up online in the reports section. Members can be marked as present, excused, or unexcused. Excused absences can have a reason attached like: Sick, Work, etc. You can define your own reasons too. For meetings which just require a total number present (like a main church service), those can easily be entered without the RFID cards.

Reports are the organization of attendance data that has been collected. There are reports by each of the aforementioned areas. You can see trends in meetings, individual groups, and individual members. You can also view members who have been absent more then twice for a meeting in a month. Reports are printable with easy to read graphs.

Utilities offer little bits of helpful functionality like: manually entering meeting attendance; emailing members by groups, meeting, and number of absences; importing members’ personal information from Excel (CSV), and exporting members’ personal information from Excel (CSV).

Search allows you to find and filter all member information (name, address, phone number, etc.) and interaction information (name, date, summary). The search results update in real time as your type so you can see how your input is refining the results.

Settings:

• You can define the terms your organization uses for: members,
  groups, and meetings. For example: students, gatherings, and classes.
• Add your organization’s logo and name to the application and reports.
• Change how data is graphed: should reports show percents or absolute values?
• Add options for excused absences. The default included: Out, Out of Town, Sick, Work, and School.

Permissions:

• You can allow certain people access to certain parts of the application. This is accomplished using Roles. Roles are groupings of permissions – allowances to do or view certain actions of parts of the application. These roles are assigned to members. For instance, it is possible to only let someone view members’ data, not edit it, and enter attendance.
• This allows more people to be involved in the managing of the church’s information BUT only within the areas assigned to them.