Evaluation of Church Membership Management Systems

Requirements

  1. Online access to names, address, email & phone (Currently:MS Access)
  2. Email newsletters (Currently:MailChimp)
  3. Attendance records (Currently:MS Access)
  4. CRM notes (Currently:MS Access—limited)
  5. Gifts and interests (Currently:spreadsheet)
  6. Donations (Currently:accounting system)
  7. Homegroup & other group email (Currently:Google groups)
  8. 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