Evaluation of Church Membership Management Systems
Requirements
- Online access to names, address, email & phone (Currently:MS Access)
- Email newsletters (Currently:MailChimp)
- Attendance records (Currently:MS Access)
- CRM notes (Currently:MS Access—limited)
- Gifts and interests (Currently:spreadsheet)
- Donations (Currently:accounting system)
- Homegroup & other group email (Currently:Google groups)
- Team scheduling (Currently:just a web page) This needs to have full email integration for both reminders and replies
Available Solutions
- Open Source Full CRM
- CiviCRM A very full featured system, but would require some configuration.
- Comments about churches who use it here and here
- Church.io/onebody Really nice interface providing a very complete church intranet
- Missing donations, newsletters & team scheduling
- Church Info web-based php/mysql on SourceForge, actively developed by Mike Wilt, but forked into Church Web CRM
- Church Web CRM fork of churchinfo by George Dawoud to bring new features. Looks very slick and full-featured. Code on Github together with Docker image.
- No email features at all, and CRM notes are not that good.
- Jethro Australian-based system.
- Commercially hosted at easyjethro
- code seems to be still on sourceforge as well?
- Six reasons my church uses the Jethro member database although he later changed to Elantro
- Some great features, like the service roster and teams
- Really nice attendance recording system
- Ability to schedule a present or future action is a really good feature
- Email newsletter seems to be totally missing, except you can export a list from time to time into Mailchimp.
- Does not seem to have any email integration, even for sending a single email. The only way to email a person is to select them from a list and then your external desktop client is invoked to send the mail. Nothing is put in the person’s history.
- kongreg8 No updates since 2013, but looks really nice (php project)
- OSC (Open Source Church) not updated since 2013
- Open Source Team scheduling
- Church Rota Team organization (php/mysql) actively developed
- Redmine
- would need some work in setting up events and creating accounts
- email would need template customizing to remove all the issue stuff, and web page is a bit cluttered
- GitHub
- would need some work in setting up events and creating accounts
- Would need to write some code that drives the api to send out reminder email for issues connected with milestones.
- First class support of email collaboration—this is probably the simplest way to go for team scheduling
- Low Cost
- Sumac Free for up to 500 users. Hosted version is $20/month
- Toronto Company focussing on handling donations and generating receipts to comply with CRA rules.
- Runs on Linux, and can be self-hosted for free if single-user
- This could be a great solution for handling the donations part of the system if it turns out to be better not to make it part of the main system.
- Expensive
Reviews and Comparisons
Other products
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Jethro clarification
Hi Andrew
Just came across this post. I'm the lead developer of Jethro. I thought it might be worth clarifying a couple of small items re Jethro.
Jethro actually allows for automated sync with Mailchimp, including several person properties, so you can send newsletters to various segments of your database quite easily.
You're right that Jethro doesn't handle the sending of emails - it provides links (from individuals, families, groups, reports, rosters etc) that open your regular email client to compose and send to the selected people. We're considering extending this in the future. Jethro can also be linked to an SMS gateway to send SMS messages.
As you mention, commercial hosting is available at easyjethro.com.au but the code is also available on github for those churches who run their own systems.
Thanks for the mention and for the helpful comparison of different tools.
Tom