5 Tips for Seamless Church Management Platform Adoption

Adopting a Church Management Platform: 5 Ways to Make Your Transition Seamless and Successful

‍

Today, more congregations than ever are seeking the benefits of Church Management Software (ChMS) to help streamline administrative tasks, improve communications, enhance member engagement, and manage finances more efficiently. Unlike disjointed software programs or manual processes, a church management platform can centralize operations to make it easier to manage church data for fund raising, event management and attendance, children’s and youth ministry, communications, and more. But adopting and implementing a new technology platform introduces change, which can be disconcerting for users and stakeholders. 

Here are five ways to make your transition to a church management platform seamless and successful: 

1. Plan and communicate early

Communicating clear goals and objectives for implementing your congregation’s new church management platform is the first step to ensuring success. Organizational change can make staff uneasy as they’re expected to learn new systems and processes for familiar tasks that they are already comfortable with and accustomed to. Communicating alignment between the system and your congregation’s goals can alleviate and address concerns from users, and gain support from the users who will be impacted the most. Involving key stakeholders early in the process can also help with testing and training, and foster buy-in.  

• Consider developing a change management strategy to address the transition, including compiling the benefits of the new system, how concerns will be addressed, and where users will be able to access ongoing support.
• Create a communications plan that addresses who will be using, and most impacted by, the new management platform.
• Where necessary, focus on specific roles that will benefit from the new platform and acknowledge how the improvements will address their current challenges. For instance, share with your treasurer how much time they'll save on annual contribution statements, or make sure your admin knows how simple mailings will be moving forward. 
• Evaluate different implementation approaches—a single cut-over date for all systems, a phased roll-out, etc.—and choose the one that best suits your congregation’s needs and resources.

‍

2. Train your team

Providing comprehensive training to end-users can increase their confidence in the new platform and ensure they maximize the features it offers. Because different roles will be taking advantage of different components of the platform, ensure that training is tailored to roles in order to help them get the most of their experience. There are many options for upfront and on-going training and support: 

• In-person training is key for roll-out
• Online, on-demand tutorials for specific roles or addressing specific features
• Webinars for new staff who need to get up to speed in the future
• A quick reference guide for common actions
• A help center with resources that can be accessed on an as-needed, individual basis 

3. Fully leverage your church management solution's customizable features

Your church management platform should offer the ability to customize features and functionality. Taking advantage of these customizations is what will truly allow your congregation and users to realize significant benefits. That’s why it’s so important for users to share what they could be doing better and how the new platform can help. Are there steps they’re taking to complete tasks that can be eliminated or streamlined to improve their workflow? Are there reports they’d like to run or a better way to look at data to help with decision making? Do they want to be able to customize groups on the fly? The adoption of a new church management solution is the perfect time to look at their roles and how they wish they could work—and then make it happen. 

4. Clean and migrate data with precision

Plan and execute data migration carefully to ensure data accuracy and completeness before importing data. This means auditing your existing records to eliminate duplicates, outdated contacts, or incomplete entries, and standardizing formats for fields (ex. phone numbers and addresses) to avoid errors. Cleaning, converting, and validating data upfront will help ensure that the data migrated to the new platform is right from the start. 

5. Start small and scale gradually

Adopting a new church management solution can seem overwhelming but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, by taking an approach that starts small and scales gradually, your adoption and implementation can be seamless and deliver big benefits. For example, beginning with a platform’s core features, such as member profiles and contribution management, will deliver success and empower your team to move confidently forward with advanced tools like customized reports or online member profiles.

From flexible setup to tailored features like attendance tracking, group management, and online giving, Servant Keeper is designed to meet your church’s unique needs.

Explore Servant Keeper’s free demo, customized to meet your goals. Get a 15-minute consult today and we’ll build a custom demo for your ministry.

‍