1 | REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014
SERAPHIM
4
THE NEXT GENERATION OF CHURCH MANAGEMENT AND CONGREGATIONAL ENGAGEMENT
If church management software is essentially the people, the activities and events the church offers (and people’s involvement in the church), how much have the events and the congregation changed in the last 20 years — or even the last three years? The simple answer: profoundly.
A SAFE PLACE, ALWAYS
11
IMPERATIVES — AND STRATEGIES — FOR USING TECHNOLOGY TO KEEP CHILDREN SECURE By Sam Batterman
At Seraphim, we love technology; but too often, it takes the front seat when process can be just as important. This article speaks to the importance of excellent procedures and process for the safety and security of your church’s children.
GEOGRAPHY MATTERS! 18 HOW TO PLAN FOR MULTI-SITE EXPANSION USING ChMS ANALYTICS AND DATA By Sam Batterman
For the church as a whole, managing growth and juggling schedules for limited resources in aging facilities are ongoing issues. In response, churches have begun to move away from enormous building funds for reconstructing existing sites into ever-larger churches, to a more networked, multi-site approach. Building a church is full of risk; but, adopting a multi-site model seems to solve many of these issues. To this end, deciding where to plant a new campus is paramount to success — and ChMS analytics and data can help a lot.
2 | REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014
REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014 | 3
SERAPHIM: THE NEXT GENERATION OF CHURCH MANAGEMENT AND CONGREGATIONAL ENGAGEMENT
When you think about a church management system, what comes to mind?
A) B) C)
Is it back office personnel madly typing endless notes into complicated profiles that only they understand? Is it trying to get the right incantation to extract the right data into a report while the pastor’s breathing down your neck? Is it recording tithe batches and going blind on endless rosters for Sunday school to record attendance from this past weekend?
What should church management be? Isn’t this already handled by software that’s been in the market for 20 years?
4 | REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014
Perhaps a better question to ask is this: Sharing between your ministry leadership If church management software is essentially team, church congregation and visitors becomes the people, the activities and events the not just easy, but fun, rewarding and valuable. church offers (and people’s involvement in the church), how much have the events and the Let’s face it — ministry is complicated congregation changed in the last 20 years — There are dozens of ways to contact people, or even the last three years? various events to register for all vying for the The simple answer: profoundly. same scarce resources, whether they’re rooms We believe the change to people’s or A/V equipment. Volunteers and staff rotate expectations about how to interact with roles in complicated fashion, and a growing any organization and how they receive demographic demands technological and selfcommunication and reach out to one another service capability from their churches. Building has changed forever. these features Seraphim is a company yourself or integrating and a product that different packages is was designed to prohibitively expensive leverage the very and makes your church pervasive technologies less nimble. Going we use every day with point solutions and apply them to that don’t share the church management same core database of and congregational people is a black hole engagement. with endless updates to Seraphim is a multiple databases An introduction to Seraphim software * comprehensive dealing with people’s environment for profiles. providing solutions Seraphim connects and services, managing resources and being the back office to the front door and gives you more closely tied to your volunteers, regular superior control over your information from any attenders and members as location. Seraphim is cloud-based, so you don’t it pertains to ministry. It does much of this for need expensive servers or special skills to install you, so you can concentrate on the mission of it and take care of it. (That’s our job.) your church. There’s no limit to how many people can use Seraphim is like an Operating System for the valuable information and the powerful tools your church. A computer operating system that Seraphim delivers. Work from home, the takes things like printers, files, cameras and file office, the road — anywhere there’s an internet folders and makes them usable to the average connection. user. Likewise, Seraphim enables groups of Seraphim is also mobile, allowing you access people, facilities, resources and events to work to the information about the people in your together in a profoundly new way. congregation and giving you the ability to Seraphim is designed to maximize your reach out to them in multiple ways. It’s always outreach and create intimacy between connected through the cloud, so there are no members, regular attenders and visitors. more outdated lists. >>
REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014 | 5
MODERN LOOK AND FEEL. Seraphim is designed with the simplified and minimalistic look that pervades software apps today on Windows and Apple products. We’ve taken every function and focused on making it super-fast, superflexible and easy to use. As many designers would tell you, simple isn’t easy to arrive at quickly; the look and speed of Seraphim is unique — especially for a web application. The design, colors and layout are bold and beautiful. We want our user’s to enjoy being in the environment as they work.
ADMINISTRATION AND THE BACK OFFICE. We start with a church management system that supports individuals, families and organizations. Group your people in any way you want, and use those groups for attendance, safe check-in and reporting and mapping. Use unlimited custom fields and tags to adapt to new situations. You can use our outreach tools to schedule visits and manage the lifecycle of getting to know visitors in a more rapid manner where no one falls through the cracks. Use our attendance features to record attendance rapidly, or have your ministry leaders use their smart phones and tablets to record attendance at the time of the event. Your leadership team will appreciate knowing the attendance numbers faster than they do now.
INTELLIGENCE AND VISUALIZATION TO HELP YOU MAKE THE BEST DECISIONS POSSIBLE. One of the biggest complaints of church management systems is that it’s very difficult to get data and intelligence out of them. At Seraphim, we’ve worked hard to make information very easy to get to using brilliant dashboards that show everything from the composition of your membership and visitors, to the financial health of the church.
6 | REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014
Our generosity dashboard shows last week’s giving, where giving stands yearto-date, tithing to funds and by method, trends of giving, and even the affluence of your church family in the form of a spatial map. Our reports are simple to use and yet flexible in their many forms. Choose a group, a detail of individuals or families, and a report you want to run, and then specify how you want it to look. Do you want a list or a directory? You can even specify mailing labels or name tags with attendance bar codes that work with safe check-in. Change the headers as you want, sort by any field, and toggle the fields you want to include in the report.
Geographic and spatial information about your congregation is super important. You need this information to decide where to put that new branch of your church or where to add a community group, or even how to modify your bus routes to get to more visitors. Unlike many other systems, Seraphim has mapping built directly into the application. You can overlay bus routes and tactics for how to get to people that need the message you’re called to deliver. We even include turnby-turn directions to help your ministry teams focus on their mission. >>
REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014 | 7
SAFE CHECK-IN AND CHECK-OUT. Use staffed or self-check-in stations to check children into classes in five seconds or less. We support Barcodes, PINs and Smart Phones with QR Codes. Or, you can skip the scanner altogether and match up six-letter unique security codes. Facial recognition and other biometric authentications are coming in 2014. Check In automatically marks attendance for you, as well. We also support lanyards, pagers and track allergy information. You can customize labels to include a QR Code or a security code along with header and footer information. Parents’ names and allergy information is also available on the tags. Parents can see where their children are on their smart phones during the service. One of the most common things we hear from customers and prospects alike is how beautiful, simple and logical our check-in station is. We’ve worked hard to achieve this simplicity, and we can’t wait to see how it transforms your children’s ministry.
COMMUNITIES AND SOCIAL NETWORKS. It’s more than just Facebook; create unlimited communities to match the complexity of your congregation. Need a teen group? Need an addiction ministry? No problem — just create a community in about a minute. Your members can Instant Message in a secure, closed environment and share photos, files, web links and even take informal polls. Each member gets a profile page to share their basic information (synched with the directory), employment, educational and ministry skills. You’ll also find unlimited discussion groups, a powerful prayer list, a care center and tools for sharing what God is doing in you and your friend’s lives.
A SEMANTIC BIBLE LIKE NO OTHER. At the heart of Seraphim is a digital bible based on semantics. View the scripture by verse, structure, geography, chronologically and topically. Share and encourage one another in bible reading. Memorize verses in a new way. Search for anything in the Bible, and understand it faster and more comprehensively.
8 | REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014
Today’s digital generation is unlikely to read a Matthew Henry commentary; but, seeing the books of the Bible as a “Periodic Table” helps them understand the collections of the bible using a modern approach. We use visualizations everywhere for better comprehension and navigation. For example, we use “tag clouds” to help people find concentrations of verses based on a topic. Use the various prisms of Seraphim to see the Bible in new ways that are authentically digital and bring new insights to timeless words. At left is an example of our Prophecy Arc tool showing verses that predicted Jesus’ birth and where each verse was fulfilled.
While you’re reading the Bible, Seraphim implicitly runs searches in the background and brings information to your attention politely. See the places you’re reading about on a digital map. Understand objects in the Bible as they relate to the modern things in our lives. For example, did you know Noah’s Ark was the length of two 747 jumbo jets lined up nose-to-nose? >>
REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014 | 9
SECURITY AND DELEGATION. You’re in control! Use our security to control who’s an administrator or a moderator. You can specify who can see Tithe and Contributions and who can delegate authority to others. WE SUPPORT YOUR CHURCH MODEL AND SIZE, NOW AND IN THE FUTURE. Seraphim supports Life / Stage, Community / Small Groups and Family Integrated ministry models. We support everything from church plants to mega churches with multiple sites. Seraphim is a cloud-based software company. That means we provide the software and all its features worldwide, 24x7, on our hardware using any internet or wireless connection. You pay for what you use.
10 | REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014
Think of us like a utility for information. You can add other services as you go (immediately) — no roll-outs, no servers to buy; just call us. We add the service and you log into that newly provisioned service a minute later. Church management is the core of Seraphim, but it’s not the end of the solution — we provide kiosk and digital signage solutions, as well, all integrated into one platform. We’re excited to be a part of the technology community that enables your mission and can’t wait to introduce you and your ministry team to Seraphim. Learn more at our website or send us email to schedule a demonstration. zz
LEARN MORE ABOUT SERAPHIM’S SAFE CHECK-IN FEATURES ONLINE!
A SAFE PLACE, ALWAYS IMPERATIVES — AND STRATEGIES — FOR USING TECHNOLOGY TO KEEP CHILDREN SECURE
BY SAM BATTERMAN
At Seraphim, we love technology; but too often, it takes the front seat when process can be just as important. This article speaks to the importance of excellent procedures and process for the safety and security of your church’s children.
The modern church is marked by deep investments in children’s ministries. Most families have a stake in this investment by either having children in these programs for many years, allowing their children to come (via a bus ministry) for multiple years, or having grandchildren in these ministries. Vacation Bible School is the preeminent investment in children’s lives in the summertime, with camp coming in a close
second for older children. Children’s ministries require an enormous amount of coordination, dollars, scheduling and facility management. Coordination of teaching materials and marshalling of snacks has the added complexity of worrying about new food allergies, diabetes and other medical scenarios. We add to these responsibilities the boom of technology which has impacted >>
REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014 | 11
all children. How we tell a story or teach a lesson needs multimedia impact to reinforce the message of the Bible, in many cases. Flannel graph versus XBOX and Ultra-HD television is an unfair fight. When it comes to children’s ministry, the biggest — and yet most subtle — changes in the last 20 years are security and safety. In the past, making sure kids weren’t hurt on the church’s playground equipment might have sufficed. Now, security and safety are marked with concerns over custody battles, pedophiles and other unknown predators. Today, for a guest with children visiting your church, the idea of leaving those kids with strangers can be a frightening proposition. • Who are these people? Have they been vetted in some way? • How will they know how to get a hold of me quickly if my child needs me? • How can I insure my child’s allergies and medical preferences are known and respected? • How will I know my child hasn’t been taken by someone I don’t know before I get back to the classroom or nursery? There are numerous stories of visitors and guests leaving a church shortly after arrival, having surveyed the security of the nursery and classrooms and deciding that staying for worship services is as risky as losing their children in a crowded mall. Technology has matured to a place where every church can not only make this issue go away, but give guests peace of mind. So, they can pay more attention to the message. Children are important to Jesus, and they should be important to us as church members. This includes every dimension of the children’s ministry.
12 | REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014
Children are important to Jesus, and they should be important to us as church members. This includes every dimension of the children’s ministry.
7 KEY SAFETY AND SECURITY MEASURES 1) Background checks for staff and volunteers. This is by far the most economical, easiest safeguard to put into place. There are many internet-based services that can do a quick search for a few dollars. Many churches require the payment from the volunteer, so it’s essentially a service that costs the church nothing but gives back immense confidence regarding who’s in the rooms with children. 2) Badges. This is the most basic security feature which should be implemented in a church setting. A badge identifies the child, their parents’ or guardians’ names, allergies and medical information pertinent to a stay of any length. This allows teachers to call the child by name and engage them in the lesson and activities, while also respecting any food allergies (increasingly common) during snack time. 3) Access to children. This measure is largely overlooked in churches. Can just anyone at the church walk into a location that’s largely filled with children? How do you know who the parents are? How do you know about potential delegates who can safely pick up children after church and raging custody battles that can land you on the front page of your local newspaper? This is a difficult one to solve because many churches haven’t had the luxury of architecting the children’s area with fixed entry and egress traffic flow. For many churches, this is a continual challenge. >>
REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014 | 13
14 | REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014
4) Diaper and bathroom duty. OK, this one is a little too obvious. Even so, every month, in nearly every city in America, there’s a news story about a child who was abused by a churchgoer. This point is more about removing the opportunity altogether for this to ever happen. To avoid nearly any kind of improper situation, taking children to bathrooms and changing of diapers should be done by the female staff. You’ll need to determine the ages in which staff and helpers assist the children in the bathroom, rather than waiting outside the restroom for them. Perhaps a “rule of two staff” for each party to the bathroom is warranted, as well. 5) Authentication of parents to children. This is where technology comes in strongly. The ability to limit who can check a child into an event — and who that child can leave with — is strongly tied to the model of the family that you have for all the family members involved. Without a strong, central database, this important security measure fails or becomes so unwieldy that it loses its value. Your church’s safe check-in processes need to be tightly integrated with your church management system. You need to understand who the family is, head and spousal roles, siblings, location and communication methods to reach parents in the event of a medical emergency. There are numerous ways to handle authentication. For well-known members and regular attenders, names and phone numbers might suffice. For visitors and guests with little to no information in the database, you must be able to quickly enter and tie together information to form these family bonds before taking the children into the church’s responsibility. This is yet another reason the safe check-in features should be >>
REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014 | 15
tightly integrated with your church management system. 6) Authorization. Authentication and authorization go hand in hand. Just because someone approaches you and asks for a child, doesn’t mean he or she is authorized by a family member to be with that child. This plays strongly to the family model (who the mom and dad are, who the siblings are, who other delegates are who are authorized to pick up children on behalf of the parents — namely, best friends and grandparents). In many cases, a security code is tied to the family unit and to the event of the child being checked in. This
16 | REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014
is known as “Safe Check In”; it’s this step of insuring authentication and authorization that separates it from just having name badges on children. Authorization can take many forms. It can be a security code that’s printed on a badge for the child, with a matching badge given to the parent at check-in. This security code is used to tie together the parent and child and has the added benefit of insuring the family model was verified at the point of check-in. This code can have various degrees of sophistication; generally, however, it should be unique to the family pairing and the event.
(In other words, the code can’t be reused over and over again, week after week. This destroys the secure aspects of authentication.) Many churches are moving away from alphabetic codes and toward symbolic codes — barcodes and QR codes, for example. While these codes usually garner a periodic reference to the book of Revelation (jokingly, in most cases), this represents a significant increase is security. Codes require additional investments in equipment. Barcodes and QR codes require scanning equipment: lasers and — in the case of QR Codes — cameras. Badge printing is usually done with thermal printers, which are different than the laser and ink-jet printers most of us use. Thermal printers burn the images onto labels using lasers. Though they have the added advantage of not using ink cartridges, they’re also somewhat expensive. Prices range based on quality and capabilities, but average cost usually falls between $250 and $350. Added to this would be barcode / QR scanners, which can fall into the same price range as a thermal printer. Many churches try to reduce these label and printing costs by issuing keychain FOBs with barcodes unique to a family. These tags — similar to the loyalty cards we use at grocery stores — can save money on printer labels, but are generally limited to members and regular church attenders. Visitors, on the other hand, will likely require printed badges. Privacy concerns and invasion of privacy will be paramount in a guest’s mind, so don’t force them to do something they find uncomfortable. In this case, options are good. 7) Visual match-up. With all these codes, we’ve greatly beefed up security. One final way to increase security and peace of mind is with pictures of both the parents and the children in a family unit. If a parent were to drop his or
her badge, a stranger could possibly use that code to be authenticated to the family unit. As such, a picture at the time of authentication / authorization is a great aid in making sure the child leaves with the right authorized adult. These pictures can be difficult to get a hold of, and they serve a different function than the Facebook profile image of the family on vacation or a favorite pet. These photos are used to authenticate individuals during the check-in / check-out process, and therefore need to be clear and unambiguous — not the parent at a party with 16 other people in the photo, for instance. Remember that photos of children under the age of 13 must be approved by parents, according to the Child Online Privacy and Protect Act, or COPPA. SUNDAY MORNING ONLY? Some churches only do safe check-in during the most popular service — usually the morning worship service on Sunday (or Saturday, for some denominations). The argument goes something like this: Most guests come to our church during this time, so we want them to have a good experience. The reality is that safe check-in — if you do it at all — should happen any time children are separated from their parents. Doing this just for guests sends the wrong message to members and regular attenders. Good security is a rigorous and vigilant process. Remember: The measure of security success is if nothing happens — not in the stopping of something sinister. Taking all these tenets and strategies into account, and then adding technology to make them rigorous and repeatable, is a good start. zz Sam Batterman is the president and CTO of Seraphim Software, a cloud-based church management software company based in Collegeville, PA. Visit Batterman and his team at Going Digital in Washington (October 2014).
REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014 | 17
GEOGRAPHY MATTERS! HOW TO PLAN FOR MULTI-SITE EXPANSION USING CHMS ANALYTICS AND DATA BY SAM BATTERMAN
For the church as a whole, managing growth and juggling schedules for limited resources in aging facilities are ongoing issues. In response, churches have begun to move away from enormous building funds for reconstructing existing sites into ever-larger churches, to a more networked, multi-site approach. The reasons are numerous — parking, for starters. One of the biggest difficulties with a monolithic approach is how to handle parking during construction at a church that’s already at capacity. (Otherwise, why build?) This disruption might actually drive visitors away and make getting into the parking lot too difficult for elderly members and regular attenders. Another challenge is how to handle the old facilities as the new ones come on-line — a whole other building project unto itself! Finally (as many pastors acknowledge), building projects are one of the primary reasons for church splits in America — not just because of the cost and organization, but because of the number of stakeholders who need to be satisfied. Building a church is full of risk; but, adopting a multi-site model seems to solve
18 | REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014
many of these issues. To this end, deciding where to plant a new campus is paramount to its success. USING DATA IN BRAND-NEW WAYS Seraphim is a cloud-based church management system (ChMS) that takes a very modern approach to statistics and data reporting. We’ll show a number of examples in this article for how data and intelligence can “tame the beast” of deciding where to open a new multi-site campus. Seraphim has all the features you’d expect a ChMS to have, but it adds a very specific focus on getting useful intelligence out of the database for making critical decisions. The information in your ChMS is extremely valuable for solving this problem, as long as you know how to describe what you’re looking to get out of the database. From that point, it’s easy to use this information in a way that helps you solve a problem — such as figuring out where to put a new church plant. Seraphim lets you create groups of nearly infinite variety. The difference is that these groups inherently “know” about geography — where things are located. In this example, we need groups that have the following
type of characteristics: • How many people are coming to your church, and from how far away are they traveling? • How many members are coming, and where are their concentrations? • How many visitors are coming? Optimally, it would be great to see “old” visitors and visitors who have recently started coming. • Can we ease their burden of travel? • Can we start the new site in a place that has good, faithful members for service and giving? Money isn’t everything, but it matters a lot for a church plant. • How disruptive will this be to existing ministries, such as small groups and affinity groups?
LET’S GET STARTED! Seraphim has a great feature called Smart Maps which enables users to composite the information for various groups onto a map. Maps are easy to understand, and therefore represent a great way to socialize the data contained within Seraphim. The first step is to understand the geographic distribution of everyone visiting your church. This includes members, regular attenders and visitors. Here, I’ve created a group that pulls everyone who visited the church since January 1, 2014. I then plotted them (as blue rectangles) based on their residential location. I also plotted the location of the current church location (with a single flag). You can already see the three major epicenters where people live. >>
Plotting everyone visiting the church since January 1, 2014, plus the location of the church.
REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014 | 19
Locating visitors from 2013 (red dots) and visitors from 2014 (green dots) Next, we add markers for people who visited in 2013 but haven’t returned in 2014 (as small red circles). We superimpose this information on everything we’ve already laid down on the map. I also added visitors who have visited the church in 2014 (as green circles).
With this single view, we can now see everyone who travels to our church, including visitors last year and this year. Now, we might want to look at travel times. Using the church as the center point, we add two circles — an orange one for 20-mile travelers and a purple one for 10-mile travelers.
Adding distance travelled. Orange circle represents 20 miles out; purple circle represents 10 miles away.
20 | REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014
Given this picture, a more informed decision-making process can begin regarding where to put a new campus. Additionally, include age studies (young families, older families and so on), as well as giving potential. Above all else, prayer and the Will of God are paramount to this decision. CONNECTING PEOPLE, SPATIALLY Another way to use spatial information which our customers are finding appealing is visualizing the proximity of members and
visitors to one another. There are a lot of uses for this scenario, but the biggest opportunity is one of care and growth. For example, look at the map below. You’ll see blue dots representing the residential locations of members and red dots representing guests who have visited the church. The tight coupling between the two groups is very noticeable, with some visitors being literally across the street from some of the members. >>
Plotting members (blue dots) and visitors (red dots) for the purposes of increasing care and assimilation
REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014 | 21
To amplify this grouping, we place green circles at one-tenth of a mile around each visitor record. This picture shows all the members directly in the vicinity who can invite them to a community group or a backyard barbecue, or take them a dessert. Another application might be for vacation bible school, or VBS. Perhaps you’d like to have a snail mail campaign and send brochures into specific neighborhoods where children who have attended your church are living. The assumption is that where some children are, there are more families with children of similar age. Seraphim has a super cool new feature in Smart Maps (called Route) which lets you trace point-to-point from a group’s location to a specific location — in this case, the church. This feature is used in the following map, where all children (12 and under) who
Emphasizing the groups of members assigned to any guest.
22 | REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014
have visited the church in the last year are plotted as blue rectangles. Then, a route is run and rendered in transparent green. You can quickly see neighborhoods that stand out where you might send brochures and flyers for a VBS event. These features are standard with Seraphim and can be used in many ways. One example is viewing your church’s bus ministry in comparison to where visitors live. Or, you can view visitors in comparison to small groups and members. We hope these scenarios and examples have inspired you to use your ChMS data in a geographic manner. zz Sam Batterman is president and CTO of Seraphim Software, a cloud-based church management software company based in Collegeville, PA.
Using Routes to show neighborhoods and commonly used roads.
REIMAGINING SOFTWARE | 07/2014 | 23