Best Uses for Your Church Management Software and Online Giving

 

Bart: Well, hey, Boyd Pelley, thanks so much for taking the time to have this conversation with me. You and I get together every once in a while, sit across the table, have a meal and just talk about ministry and things that are going on in our lives in ministry and we were talking via Zoom a few days ago and I said we should probably do this and record it. There’s just a lot of stuff that we talk about and a lot of things that I think would be helpful for for other people and so I thought for those of those my friends who are watching this, who don’t know who you are, I’ll just kind of give you a little bit background. You are the co-founder of Churchteams, which is a church management software. But prior to that, close to 20 years in pastoral ministry working with families and discipleship, and you lived all over the United States. But I’m proud to say, have come home to heaven. Texas, North Texas, we actually only live maybe about 15 minutes away from each other. Anything else there that you wanted to add about who you are and what you’re up to these days?

Boyd: Well, probably the only other thing that I would add is I’m looking forward to the day when the restaurants are open. And you and I can actually sit across the table and actually have lunch again together. This is a crazy time that we’re in right now, this COVID-19 thing. And so no, looking forward to jumping in here. We’ve been doing Churchteams now for almost 20 years. The first day I was on church staff and just did this on the side. It’s been fun the last 12 years to focus on it full-time and love to talk with you some more about how we can help this out in how we help in a decentralized digital church.

Bart: Excellent. Well, one of the things I wanted to kind of start off with was actually just kind of talk a little bit about a blog post that you posted, emailed out.  I’m on your email list and I saw this. I guess it was maybe a week ago or so, maybe a little bit longer. And the topic or the title of the blog post was, “How to use your software when you can’t use your church building”. Obviously, we’re in a state where a lot of churches who’ve invested a lot of time and a lot of energy building their ministry platform, their ministry structure around their gathering place, their physical location. People aren’t, they’re not able to do that right now. And one of the things that I thought was kind of clever was the way that you broke down how there are all these digital avenues now that sort of play different roles in our virtual church building. Why don’t you spend a little bit of time kind of just expanding on some of the thoughts that you shared in the blog post.

Boyd: Absolutely. And the other part of it that comes from that is from hanging around with guys like you that have had kind of a marketing background and think about different ways to set up marketing so that you can accomplish key objectives. And I thought, you know, what if I tied how people use software to a church building. Obviously, the livestream, whatever version, whatever software you use or how did you do that? That’s the worship center, obviously. Right? It’s where we go, everybody gathers, does all that. But then I thought beyond that, what about the classroom or the small group and somebody’s place? And I thought, well, that’s obviously some sort of video chat, whether it’s Zoom, like you and I are doing here, Google Hangouts or something like that. And so we’re seeing groups all over the place. My groups are still meeting. We’re meeting virtually just like you and I are meeting now and having a great time. And then, what about the fellowship hall? This is a place where everybody gets together and hangs out and just talks. And I thought, you know, that really is the purpose of social media. It’s a place where everybody kind of chips in and there’s a topic and there might be another group of people over here with another thread that are going here and you kind jump back and forth between them and, if that was a church building, it’d be the fellowship hall. And I just think, sometimes pastors and church staff have, not sure how to think about all the different software that’s out there. And I think, thinking of it through the purpose perspective of why we do this architecture in this building could be a really helpful way, during this time, especially, to think about how to use software. Towards that end, a couple of other key parts of the room that I thought about. Those, of course, were the core three spaces. But then I thought, what about that gathering space, or that foyer, when somebody comes into a church the first time.  They get there, they get a feel for the architecture. They kind of know, OK, there’s the worship center, there’s the classroom, there’s the kids area. So you kind of get the layout of how things work there. And really, for a church, that’s a church website. That’s kind of your front door nowadays. Even when the buildings open, that’s your front door, right? Your website, because everybody’s googling going there.  And then the other little component, that sometimes gets mixed in here is a blog. And some churches have blogs. I really encourage, especially a pastor, to have a blog where you’re just summarizing. Used to be the newsletter article. That can be the blog. But it’s like going to the conference room or the pastor’s conference where you’ve got a committee, a little group meeting together, hearing the pastor’s heart. And that’s kind of the purpose of the blog. So I think it’s helpful, thinking of the different software as if it were different rooms and different purposes within your building.

Bart: Yeah. I think that’s really interesting actually.  One of the things that sort of stood out to me was, social media as the fellowship hall. And I’m really passionate about this but I think oftentimes, churches tend to use social media too often as a one-way method of communication and engagement.

Boyd: Yes.

Bart: And I think that you’ve kind of hit the nail on the head there, that is, if we’re thinking about our social media platforms, whatever, whatever your church is on, whether, you know, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, if churches are doing that, Tick-Tock, if churches are doing that. To think about those places of social media engagement as being places, well, for that particular purpose, for engagement, not just a one-way communication. It’s not just the church making announcements or providing information, but it’s a place where people can actually engage and participate. So I thought that was that was a very interesting one. I think, too. Well, I did need to clarify one thing.  You referred to the gathering space as the foyer. For those who are watching this, who are not from Texas, that’s the foyer. I left Texas a long time ago, moved to Canada and learned that it’s you know, most people pronounce it foyer, but I’m just clarifying that in case anyone didn’t understand.

Boyd: Thank you. A little bit of that French influence coming in there.

Bart: Your Texas-ese  I mean, you’ve lived in other places other than Texas so I’m sure you’ve heard foyer before.

Boyd: I have, I have too. I always thought that was a weird way to say that.

Bart: It’s not spelled that way, is it? All right. So, let me ask you another question.  I mean obviously, your wheelhouse, your space that you’re living in day-in, day-out, from an occupational vocational standpoint and the way that you serve the church is through church management software. A system that you and your team have built to help churches accomplish a lot of different things and overcome a lot of different obstacles and hurdles. A lot of those hurdles and obstacles that churches are facing today are really no different. We want to engage people. We want to be communicating with people. We want to be tracking where people are in their spiritual growth. We want to be tracking, giving, and all kinds of stuff like that. But why don’t you talk a little bit about just what type of role a church management software plays in a digital church environment, an online church environment, that might be a little bit different than what it would be if we were actually meeting in person every Sunday.

Boyd: Yeah, I think there’ll be some differences. Probably quite a bit of overlap, even if you are meeting in person on there. But, of course one of the big things, if you think about your church management system. That’s where all your people are, also how you organize people, by classes, committees, where they’re serving, all of that. So, one of the huge advantages of the church management system is to be able for it to be a communication tool. So that if I want to send a communication to one of those certain groups or target something to these people or I’ve got church staff or volunteers, it won’t target that. To be able to communicate just to that subset of people, primarily by email and text. So those end up being the big things. That’s why, like a year ago, we built out our email system so we’d be competitive and do all the extra features that people get in Mailchimp or a Constant Contact. So you can do some nice emails but then you can target and you’re not limited to just what the newsletter list is or that kind of thing. And I always think of the email really as more like the newsletter, kind of thing, where it kind of goes out and does that. But one thing I’m finding here is texting, on the other hand, people are trying to use text as if it were email and it’s just not email. It’s different. Text was built for 159 characters. It’s built to be short and really, I like thinking of text more as a sign posted or a reminder. I see churches use text and they tell people to check their e-mail, okay, and you know. Or I see them send out a text and there’s a link in the text that takes them to a website or, you know, a web page that has the rest of the details of it. So it’s just kind of, text is really to capture your attention quickly, and click a link or as a reminder to go somewhere else. When people get these long texts, you know, that are twelve hundred characters long instead of a one hundred fifty-nine, or seven or eight chunks and some of the carriers, especially, will get them mixed up so you’d get number three and then you’d get six and then five and, its a mess.

Bart: Yeah. I think that’s such an important note. I’ll be honest, I haven’t experienced that from my church. They’re doing a pretty good job with communication. But my kids, my boys, who are in high school are doing church, sorry school online, like everybody is now, and different teachers are communicating in different ways, and there are a couple of teachers that are sending out these text messages that I’ve got to have a decoder ring to figure out the order that that the texts are coming in. I can’t figure it out. It’s absolutely crazy. You actually had written another blog post and I’ll link to it with this video post. Basically, it was called something like, six questions to ask before you send that text. And I thought that was really an important thing, kind of a filter for people. My communication filter has always been to ask questions. Is it the right message? Is it the right time? Is it the right platform? And those are things that as a community, as a communications professional, as a person, whether you’re communicating in the business world or communicating in the church world, or even communicating to your students’ teachers at school, your kid’s teachers, you need to make sure you’re sending the right message at the right time and using the right platform for that. But having both options is really important.

Boyd: And I think your idea of using the right platform, I think that’s what can get confusing, especially to some pastors that may be in ministry and communications isn’t necessarily their forte. And so they’re not sure. How does my website, relate to my blog post, relate to social media, relate to email, relate to…. So you’ve got all of these, where back in the past, you had your newsletter and you mailed it out, and that was it. So you helping people understand that right platform. I think we’ve always, for the most part, understood you want to have the right message at the right time. But in the last 15, 20 years, understanding the platforms and the different difference is really a big deal.

Bart: Yeah. OK. So on that note, so far, like we’re talking about e-mailing and talking about texting, that’s primarily one way. And one of the things that you mentioned was the fact that you’re seeing some churches or are at least implanting the idea with churches that they can actually use their church management system as a way of capturing stories and things that are going on in the lives of people in their church. How would a church do that?

Boyd: Well, there’s a bunch of different ways. One of the things that we did is, we originally built our software to help churches manage decentralized small groups. When I was a discipleship pastor, we had our classes on Sunday morning and then we had small groups of men all throughout the week and we needed to get information back from them. So we learned that we could push out an email, people click on it, do attendance, right from their phone, one click from an email and then do the attendance. Then, the key part of it was, that it’s not just for attendance, it’s for a way to see, help the people to communicate with each other. So in that, we set up a system where you can be able to capture, kind of notes of what’s going on in a group, what’s their activity, their prayer requests, those kind of things, to be able to capture that. That’s one system, on just like the attendance of a group and kind of knowing who’s there are these groups meeting. That’s a big deal, especially now. Are they even connecting with folks? It’s a lot different than the Sunday school days where somebody’s teacher was gone. They got a substitute teacher. Well in a small group system, that’s not how it works. They just won’t meet a certain week and over a period of time, that group may have come out and they’ve not met for  four weeks and you don’t even know it. So we need to have some system to be able to do some pastoral care and that kind of thing and capturing stories. The other thing that we will do is also use things like registrations for an event like this to where people can go to a website or whatever, use an event registration. So it’s very much like any registration tool you would think of, except you design the registration forms for specific objectives. One of which could be, just to say, here’s a need. So I did another blog post, about a week and a half ago, to folks on how to create a registration to capture people’s needs. People that are afraid to go out. People that need, you know, that are at risk, whatever, to also capture people that are caring for folks. And I think we’re right now, at a stage where that could ramp up and become a really big deal for us, when people have family members, friends and they’re caring for people in their community group.  And then also volunteers that can help in those and to be able to connect those and then to be able to get feedback using things like notes where you make an assignment, hey, would you follow this person up? They can then get that note by email or text when clicked on a page and then give you feedback on the follow up, much like a salesforce or a HubSpot where you’re doing ongoing follow up. And in that, you’re capturing the stories of what’s kind of going on.

Bart: Ok. No, that’s actually really interesting, I hadn’t thought about. One of the things that’s been kind of a big concern for me, as I watched a few weeks ago, churches scrambling to figure out how to deliver content for Sunday online. Like that was obviously the first thing that church leaders had to figure out. Churches that didn’t yet have some sort of mechanism for, whether it was a livestream or even pre-recording their sermons or their messages and posting them on Facebook or YouTube or church online platform. So there was this big scramble but that was really only part one of the equation. That’s only one hour on Sunday. There’s one hundred and sixty seven other hours of the week, I think, if I get my math right and there’s all this stuff going on in the lives of our people, our church members, our church family. And, you know, the question that I had is, what are the steps that we’re gonna take to actually be able to do ministry and be the church in those other one hundred sixty seven hours in the week. So I think those are some really helpful tips. Thanks for that. One of the other big questions, that a lot of churches had, when this whole thing hit was, “what do I do about online giving?” I mean, these statistics, maybe, they’re a few years old, but I was reading that somewhere around, I think it’s around, 65 percent of American churches have an online giving platform, which seems like a lot. It means, well, there’s not that many that don’t, only 35 percent that don’t, but that 35 percent that don’t represents more than 80 thousand churches across the country, I believe. And most of those would be small churches. Churches that can’t afford to probably not have an offering for a few weeks. So, I shared with you the other day, Google Trends graph for the search phrase “church online giving” and there was a hard, up to the right. Because I would only imagine that there were tens of thousands of pastors, elders and church leaders, that at the blink of an eye, were all getting onto Google and trying to figure out how to set up some sort of online giving. Online giving isn’t necessarily what you are an expert in, but online giving is a significant component of the service that you provide in Churchteams. So I thought I’d ask you a few questions specifically about online giving that you might be able to help, kind of, direct people as they’re looking for a solution to this obvious problem. So why don’t you just share with me some of the insights that you would have on what you would consider to be the most important features of an online giving platform?

Boyd: Yeah, well, and you’re exactly right. I know, I was looking at some stats this morning with our online giving. This is, just this one month, we have added the same number of new online giving users as we did in the last nine months of last year. In one month. So, you know, for us right now, it’s up 9, 10 times compared to our average. So we’re blessed, in trying to stay on top of really trying to help folks get online giving figured out. And you’re right. A lot of it is smaller churches or churches that just haven’t had a need for it because they counted on, you know, checks and cash. There’s a couple of things you can do. One, obviously, you can tell people to use PayPal and put that out there, but it’s not a giving platform. And then the problem with that, would be, you’ve got to then count. Somebody has got to come in and somebody is going to have to key in all that information. You’re going to be able to import it. Also, it’s going to take the amount out of the gift right up front. So they gave one hundred dollars but you only get ninety-seven and online giving platforms will give them full credit for the full hundred and then do a bill at the end of the month and manage it as one bill at the end of the month. A lot of people don’t see that big a difference. Obviously, getting people to do Bill Pay, go online and their bank and do Bill Pay and send it. That’s a good solution. But then you’re still sending in a check. You’re mailing in a check, and then the staffs getting that and they’re not. So, online giving. Couple of things you want it to do. You want it to be really simple, you know, the user experience has got to be really simple. They got to look at and say, “I can do this”.  Honestly, nowadays, you don’t want an online giving platform that requires a guest to create an account. You don’t have to do that. They can just put in the amount, their name, their email address. Got to have the email address so you can send them a statement and then what fund they want to give it to, and then put in their checking account information, savings account information or their credit card. So, the user experience, being minimal information, no log-in required to give. Now  almost all will give you an option on the back end, to create an account, so you can go in and track your giving history and do a bunch of other things like that, which is terrific. That’s usually a good option.

Bart: I’m going to stop you there, I want to ask you a question though. So you said two things. I’m thinking in my mind, I’m thinking about, smaller churches across the country, many of them might be, you know, suburban or rural churches, many of them probably have aging congregations. And there are two things that you sort of, you mentioned. One of which, I think for older people and well, not just for older people, but for everyone is, I’ve got to put in my credit card number. I’ve got to put in my credit card number. Is that really safe? Is it safe to put your credit card number into these systems?

Boyd: And, you know, all of us are concerned about this. You read all these horror stories about tired of being broke into and all that kind of stuff, so it really is a big issue to be concerned with. And it is, I mean, it’s safe to do that because the platforms are built on, they have this thing, there’s a compliance level that the government demands of those. When people hack in to get information, it’s not through an online giving platform or payment platform. It’s not through that. It’s on the back end that they’re getting in there. It’s just, you got to make sure that the person that’s asking you for that information is the legit person. That’s the key. Is that the person that’s asking that, you know for sure this is the church, that’s giving you this. And the way you do that is, the church puts a link on your website or on your Facebook page. So, that validates it, because it came, the church put it out there and I went to that place and clicked on the link and I could see, to be able to get it. So, that’s really the key, being able to do that. But then, once you put in your credit card number, your checking, your savings account number and really the only reason between those two things, is the credit card number is going to take about 2 percent, 2 to 3 percent out of the donation, where the ACH or the online, putting in your checking and savings account. That’s going to be like a fraction of 1 percent, up to 1 percent. It depends on the provider that you have, but it’s a fraction. It’s a lot less to do it that way.

Bart: So that makes a lot of sense. Now what about texting? Like I’m in a bunch of different groups on Facebook where there are church communications, church leaders and people. And I see constantly, in these threads of communication, people who have been doing online giving, but now they’re trying to crack the code of text-to-giving because maybe the platform that they’re using doesn’t have a text to give feature. How does text-to-give work? How does that differ from just going onto the church’s website and hitting the “Give Now” button?

Boyd: Yeah, so, the idea with text-to-give is. A church can have a phone number. And we developed this thing called “text-to-church” a number of years ago, and when we built that, our text-to-give thing, and you can do a lot of things with this phone number. In fact, now, with us, you can actually use your landline number, the number somebody would call. And people can text that number to be able to give. And so, what that works like, is you can literally have a phone number and people text the word “GIVE” or they can text an amount and they’ll get a link back from the systems. What happens is, their phone goes to the database, church management database, in our case, payment processing. I mean, the payment, that other company’s database, in other cases. And when it hits that, then it recognizes a phone number. It sends a link back to the phone number. They click on the link and that’s what will give them really, the same page.  Most of the time, it’s almost exactly the same page that they would give online. That’s to set it up. The real magic with text-to-give, comes after that setup, because that phone number, when it hits the database, the database knows it’s there. So it’s like logging in. So that enables us, an individual to say, you know, you do an appeal to me to give, you know, 20 bucks to whatever cause that we’re doing, I can literally just go to that phone number, text the church office number, now, a certain number, a number, 20 bucks, send it. And it’s like putting cash into play. I just put a $20 bill. In fact, I did some analytics on that, to see how texting is working compared to the overall giving in churches. And we’re seeing, on the digital age, the recurring giving, the online giving and people paying by checks, that percentage is about the same. But then the cash giving and giving by text is about the same as well. So, it’s a nice little way because it’s so simple. Once people set it up, I can just put, you know, $100 submission and I’m done. I don’t have to fill out a form. So that’s how it’s different than going online. Once I’ve set it up, I don’t have to go back, do the form, anything like that because the phone number validates me to the database.

Bart: Ok. That’s very interesting. That’s very technical. But, let’s put it this way. It’s good to know that there are people like you who know how it all works and can make it all work. Most of us just need to be able to pick up our phone and and figure out how to put the number in. We don’t necessarily need to know how all the backend stuff works, but it gives us confidence to know that someone does. Let me ask you a couple of questions about some of the things that maybe, like, here’s the deal. If I got online and I googled “church online giving platforms”, I’m going to get a pretty long list in that Google search return. Most of them are going to be the systems that are designed to do one thing and one thing only, giving. Some of them are designed to do multiple things, whether it’s communication and giving or database systems and giving. Why don’t you share a few things that you would advise someone on, to be aware of, when they start comparing and contrasting different options for their online giving?

Boyd: Yeah.  So I think what happens when people give online, afterwards and how do you get the information back into the church management system? So it goes on people’s giving records, so they can get credit for it, so they can get their statements at the end of the year. That integration with the database networks in three different ways. Some of them, just send you, like a little file and then people have to go back in and manually enter it. So it’s not any different from the back end from your admin assistants perspective than getting checks and cash. I’m still having to manually enter that information. Some of them, will send a file that you’ll get, and then you can import that file into your church management system. That’s easier than manually putting them in. That’s not overwhelmingly difficult. But then the other ones, are the ones that are actually fully integrated with the church management system. By full integration, I don’t mean I can just import it, you know. I mean, when I give, it’s automatically on giving record. I don’t have to do anything with it. And of course, that’s by far, the easiest. And the financial admins love that, as you would guess, because when somebody gives, they don’t even have to touch it. They know it’s automatically put in there and then right from there, they can run reports based on people’s giving. So in terms of integration, that would be a big, big thing to look for is, which one, you know, which one of those do you want to do and approach. If I had a church management system, I would start with the church management system and see what software is there, what payment processing plan that they have, first. I would actually start with that. And, if they don’t have one, then I would look maybe at one of the others or come to Churchteams because we can do both for them, right, and have that all integrated together there.

Bart: Alright. What are some other things that, you know, might be things that people need to evaluate when they’re looking at, you know, different platforms and different options?

Boyd: Yeah. You kind of have to be aware of some of the other pieces because a lot of these companies that are payment processing only, that’s like their only deal.  So that’s everything to them. And so like any business, they’re going to build additional products so that they can build their business, you know, have another stream of income, so it’s not all dependent, just on one. So you’ll find folks that’ll add in apps as another thing and of course, there’s a whole other discussion, right, between the apps and websites that we can have them, you know, have on another day. But, you know, do you really want him to do an app or people really download the app, all those kinds of things. So but that’s an income producer for an autonomous giving platform, because then again, you know, you have to charge for the app and you build the app and you customize the app and all of that. And that’s a lot more outside the scope of online giving because unlike giving, you need a link and you can email it. You can text it, you can social it, you can put it on your website. That’s all you really need to get the basics. So to be aware that when somebody is selling a lot of side products towards the delivery system, that’s all those are, is their side products to the actual delivery system. So that’s one thing. And then some of them have different types of costs that aren’t as obvious upfront. And so you want to dive in and make sure you understand, you know, are there any hidden costs? Are there any additional costs? You know, there’s typically, there’s a monthly cost and there’s a per transaction costs that’s usually made up of a flat fee per transaction and then a percentage. But then there’s some other things that can be out there as well. So you make sure you ask about those.

Bart: That’s really helpful stuff. It’s it’s a lot for church leaders, elders, financial directors to be kind of filtering through in a very short timeframe, because I’m sensing that a lot of church leaders are feeling the pinch to get something going sooner than later. And I appreciate you taking the time with me today to kind of just discuss a few of these different aspects, things that people might want to be considering different ways that they can use their church management system, different ways to consider online giving. If somebody wanted to get in touch with you, ask you further questions about Churchteams or just about any of the things that we talked about today, how can people reach you?

Boyd: Obviously, our website is church teams, T-E-A-M-S dot com and my email is Boyd @ churchteams.com.  You can reach us on our phone number. Its 817-405-9750. That’s our support teams right there. Those are some great ways to do it and if you go to our website, I do webinars where we get into the details of this. I’ve got one that’s an overarching “meet the software”. It’s a high level view. And then I’ve got one, six additional trainings on different areas, one of which is the giving. Another one is the registration and events and some of those kind of things to help people really dig in and see how software can really come alongside and help them.

Bart: That’s great. Thanks. Boyd, I appreciate you taking the time. I’m sorry that we didn’t get to share a meal over this conversation. Hopefully we’ll get out of our houses and be able to do that really soon.

Boyd: Yeah, me too. I’m looking forward to that. We’ll have another good lunch here, hopefully in a few weeks.

Bart: Thanks, brother.

Boyd: Alright, see you Bart.