At the beginning of the year the staff of the church I serve in sat down and began to develop a strategy for the next 12 – 18 months. This has caused some extra work on my end, due to my ability with systems and structures. One of the main things that we put on our priority list is tackling how to get people involved beyond their first visit. We’ve definitely improved on our ability to get people into the front door. However, we need to adjust our follow-up and involvement processes. This doesn’t just mean calling people after their first visit. Although that’s part of it. This doesn’t just mean improving our system of announcements, although there is also that.
So I’m thinking through, and vetting, solutions. I’m working to find a good all-in-one solution for follow-up, reminders, ongoing communication, and a system to manage and track impact. Something similar to the city or church community builder. The closest I’ve come to finding something like this is a CRM system. To explain, CRM stands for Client Relationship Management and most CRM’s are built with many of the features that I’ve listed above. So I’m not thinking Client Relationship Management, but retooling a product as Church Relationship Management. I plan on building this out further in the coming weeks and seeing how it works and scales for churches.
What do you think? Have you seen this implemented well anywhere? Does your church use this? How do you close the back door?
I am working on the same issues right now for a church. Using online forms, FAQs, WordPress, email campaign, mail, and phone call follow ups. Making sure visitors are aware of the programs, volunteer efforts, missions, training, classes, etc, that are available to grab their interests. Having feedback forms, and options to sign up for different alerts on varying mediums. For example, sign up for prayer requests to be emailed or texted to the cell phone. Emergency prayer requests can be texted instead of emailed.
Nice! I’d be interested to know how that’s going.