The #1 Requested Feature for a CHMS is…

We recently conducted an informal survey of church administrators to identify the most important feature in a church management system. Instead of offering a list of possible features, we asked an open ended question – ‘What features would be most important if you could use a secure web-based system for church management?’

Nearly 75% of respondents said the most important feature is: Easy to Use. These church administrators typically felt that their current systems required significant training and repeated contact with their vendors in order to keep their systems working. In several cases, the administrators had simply stopped using their systems.

So how do you create a system that is easy to use? At Fresh Vine, our answer is to make the system easy to access and easy to navigate, and provide a screen design that is intuitive and consistent.

Access

A web-hosted system is very easy to access because it available anywhere a person has access to the internet. Volunteers can have secure access from their home, from a coffee shop and even from their smart phone.

Intuitive

To make Fresh Vine easy to navigate, we provide a logical grouping of feature tabs with drop down lists. We also provide contextual links to related content/pages based on the user’s current place in the system. To make our system intuitive and consistent, we follow best practice web design standards, and make sure that functions that are performed at different levels (e.g., church wide and group rosters, events and emails) have the same look and feel.

Other Results

The other two results that regularly came up were: integrated solution (supports multiple areas of the church) and has an easy member search.

Paul Backes – Principal

Paul has over 30 of years experience in the systems technology industry. For the last ten years he has focused on creating and implementing web-based systems. He has a unique ability to understand organizational needs and how to apply best practices in processes, technology and user experience to meet those needs.