Naturally Networked
ChurchInfo runs on any server that supports PHP and mySQL. The server may be in-house or at an ISP anywhere on the Internet. Any number of people may access the database simultaneously.
Family
A family is a group of people who are treated as a unit. The obvious example would be a married couple and perhaps their children. The family members do not need to have the same last name, but they should live at the same address to receive newsletters and financial statements. Pledges and payments are tracked by family. Some churches call a Family a “Pledging Unit”.
Person
A person is an individual associated with the church. A Person can be a member of a Family, and a person can also be a member of one or more Groups. A Person has individual contact information, such as a cell phone number and an email address. A Person also has a relationship with the church as “Member”, or “Guest”.
Group
A group is a collection of people, such as the choir or the stewardship committee. Groups have many uses. Here are a few ideas: committees, church school classes, covenant groups, baby sitters. The possibilities are endless. ChurchInfo makes it easy to contact all the members of a group by letter or email.
Pledges and Payments
Pledges and Payments are tracked for each fiscal year, with automated support for reminder letters. There is also automated support for generating donation acknowledgement letters for tax purposes based on the calendar year. The entry of payments is highly automated, with support for check and credit card scanners, automated deposit slip printing and electronic submission of credit card and EFT payments.
Volunteer Tracking
ChurchInfo allows you to create “Volunteer Opportunities” like baking, lawn-mowing, babysitting, letter-stuffing, etc. These opportunities may be assigned to people, making it easy to locate them when the need arises.
Permissions
Access to financial data may be restricted to one or just a few individual users as appropriate. Most users just need access to the Person, Group and Family information to look up phone numbers, generate address labels and send email.
Mapping
The latitude/longitude coordinates of each Family may be used to plot the congregation on a map, or to find the nearest neighbors in the congregation for a particular family.
Canvass Automation
ChurchInfo provides support for conducting an every-member canvass, and capturing the results in the database. The canvassers receive briefing sheets with information about each family to be contacted. During or after the contact the canvasser enters comments in the database.
Sunday School Support
Classes may be defined as Groups with roles “Teacher”, “Student”, “Liaison”, and then special Sunday School reports may be used to generate class lists and attendance sheets.
Bug Reports, Feature Requests, Discussion Groups
Feel free to contact the development team using these links to this project on the SourceForge server:
Bug report | Feature request | Support request |Discussion groups