I was asked by someone in the Church Community Builder office to provide thoughts on how CCB could better help non-church ministries.
Here was my reply, as a result of brief reflection. Anyone else got thoughts? Any Elvanto fanbois wanna explain why Elvanto solves these problems better?
1. Cost is more prohibitive in a college ministry - so a cheaper price scale to enable us to move to Deluxe Version would be wonderful.
- We are based on external donors rather than regular givers.
- We tend to be more organisationally complex than a church of equivalent size:
- campus ministries tend to have more staff per member than churches, because we are leading, much young people with a higher turnover,
- we often run more conferences and events in a calendar year,
- we are managing not only church members but donors, graduates.
2. Group Promotion would be great if we could leave people in a group based on GRADUATING DATE (a custom date field we create) rather than age.
3. Small groups are more likely to be a 'front door' for campus ministries, and so being able display:
- PRECISE times custom built in the 'when and where' section of groups - rather than just morning/evening etc. we have worked around this by adding time-based customfields... but it'd be great to just use a calendar style function
- Group Leader-defined Venue - rather than having the where in 'when and where' being a drop down of customziable fields, it'd be great if the group leader could just type it in
4. We have to track precise volunteer roles of lots of student leaders, and be able to provide easy reports on this:
- we currenty use POSITIONS to do this, but it feels quite 'clunky' because I understand that Positions are primarily design to create rosters, right?
5. Campus ministries are built by networks of 1:1 mentoring relationships, and there is currently no easy way to pair people not based on department-coach-group leader hierarchy, but based on who is in charge of mentoring whom:
- we currently use Process Queues to pair people to one another - but it's not intuitive and it manually requires us to add new mentors as 'queue managers' each time as needed.
6. A non-HTML email option would be great, as college students can tend to interpret html-rich emails as spam/advertising.
7. I suspect there are features around Process Queues would help the support-raising process, but haven't played around with this enough to know if Process Queues are already.
8. We track relationships not just to individuals but also to churches andother organisations. It would be great to have clearer guidance on how to treat organisations as 'people' in the CCB system.
via Blog - Christian Reflections http://ift.tt/1KyyH5Z (NB: to comment go to http://ift.tt/1joromF)
