Tech Tuesday: open source church management software

As the questions come in, we'll feature them here at the Digital @ Leadership Network blog. This question explores how to use existing open-source web apps (usually free) for managing a church's databases of information:

[I'm a] pastor of a small church plant located in [Alabama].  We are on a very tight budget.  We used ConnectionPower for the first two years to manage visitors and members at our church, but had to discontinue it this year due to budget cutbacks.  I've been searching for open source solutions to church management software and haven't found any compelling examples.  I wondered if you knew of anyone using Google Docs or Zoho Office to manage a church.

I use Google Apps for Domains for our church email.  I also use Google Docs to store and share church related documents.  I'm experimenting with Zoho and see a lot of potential in Creator and DB.  I'm a bivocational pastor/mechanical engineer and feel very comfortable with spreadsheets and databases, but worry church members won't be.  I'd appreciate your thoughts on this! 

What have you found in the open-source and/or free web app space that works for a smaller church or a smaller non-profit organization?

Have a church tech question? Email them to dj.chuang[at]leadnet.org to be featured here on a future Tech Tuesday.

// DJ Chuang is a Director at Leadership Network, launching digital initiatives, and connecting multi-site churches and Asian American pastors. He joined the Leadership Network team through a partnership with L2 Foundation.

Comments

[djchuang]

I found 3 softwares that are described as "open source" church management softwares (via a Google search):

ChurchInfo http://www.churchdb.org/
Open Source Church http://sourceforge.net/projects/osc/
ChurchLedger http://www.churchledger.com

These may be worth investigating to see if it meets your church's needs.

[Keith Rowley]

I have also looked for an Open Source CHMS but wanted something I built using VB and ASP.NET as I wanted to be able to extend it to fit my needs and am most familiar with these programs.

In the end I have decided to build something my self from scratch and will probably open source it when I get done.

Drop me a comment if you want more info.

[Andrew Mitry]

Brian Glass is working on an open source church management solution as well (currently in alpha) at http://sheepology.org/

[Justin]

A few more:

-http://www.churchradius.com
-http://beonebody.com
-http://www.tocella.com - still under development

Not free, but inexpensive:

-http://www.membershipedge.com

Finally, he could perhaps use http://www.dabbledb.com to create something.

[Gabe Hoffman]

I had this same question, and then it hit me that churches aren't quite as unique as they think they are usually, and so it was a question of how a normal business would solve this problem of member management and the answer was kinda obvious. Find a good customer/contact relationship tool and work some metaphors. Like the contacts are the members, and business contacts are family units (since people can be grouped in businesses) and then the people's business title is their role in their family. So we use the tool called Highrise, one of the www.37signals.com products, and now for $24 a month 6 users can manage 5000 contacts. We are actually using it between 40+ people and several thousand contacts. Now, it's not quite free, but it's based on how many people need access to the information, not how many people you have as contacts (great for churches). It even has an iPhone app. So all that to say, once you get it out of your head that a church CMS is the only solution, you'll be freed up to spend a lot less and have the door open to a lot better and more up to date solutions. But I'm sure that a high priced, technologically slower, and proprietary solutions are right for some people. ;) The good news you are already on a great track with using Google Apps for your domain. Good work and good question.
Am I the only on that just doesn't believe in chCMS? And I'm not trying to rip on those guys, I really do think they have a great heart and aren't actually trying to rip churches off or anything. I just think we do ourselves a disservice building up walls around proprietary church solutions. I mean honestly if we as church techies had really been leading the way we should have been the ones that came up with facebook and opensourced it to the world, not try and come up with a christian version of it for our little church communities. Sorry I digress.

[Trevor]

Hi, my name's Trevor and I'm with Excellerate church management software. Our software isn't open source, but since your main concern seems to be with price anyway, I thought I would mention that our software is free for churches under 50 members (and you could include 50 prospects too). You said your church is small, and I don't know if it's in that 50 member range, but I thought I would mention it just in case. You can get our free version from www.excellerate.com

And, since I work for a ChMS company, I wanted to at least put in my two cents on Gabe's comment. I'll start by saying that he was articulate and respectful in what he said. I don't want it to appear like I'm ragging him or like he said something offensive. A reading like that would be a miscommunication. He has a good point that churches should examine all options and find what's best for them whether it carries the term "Christian" or not. After all, if business software helps you save souls, God won't be mad. But, my take is that ChMS is generally better, just because there are some things in the church that businesses don't deal with. For instance, small group Bible studies. Business software can help you track who was at a meeting, but it's not really designed with the intent that this meeting will be ongoing and most meeting apps don't focus on tracking the size of the meeting directly, but in a Bible study you want to track as a measure of health. That's just one example. That may not be a big deal for where you're at, which is fine. The key is just to find a software that meets your needs and has the ability to grow with your church so you don't have to keep getting new software.

[Jay]

In addition to the comments already said the organization should also decide on what kind of architecture they may want. What I mean by that is do they want a hosted solution, which removes the administration of backing up, restoring, upgrading, etc from the staff’s responsibilities, or do they want an in house solution.

With either type of architecture the organization should keep an open mind about past solutions and what is available now. Many churches I speak with still think the Internet is unsafe to keep data for the church. While you may hear about all kinds of security breeches in the technical industry these are the exception and not the general rule. The in house solutions can be just as unsafe as the Internet given the right circumstances (IE: disgruntle employee, thief of the computer, etc).

Once the type of architecture is chosen by the organization then it comes down to the vendors that can supply that type which should narrow your field quite a bit. Some vendors only deal with hosted solutions while others only deal with In house solutions. Some like Icon Systems Inc ( www.iconcmo.com ) have both.

The next item to look at is what features does the software HAVE to have. As mentioned churches are individual in their needs and as such, no one software will address all those needs for every organization. For example you may want to combine your accounting (typically done in Quickbooks) with your CMS solution to save money. Not all software hosted or in house can do this function. This would again eliminate certain vendors just based on the needs of the church. Coming up a list from the start would greatly improve the church's ability to pick the right solution for them. The list should contain Must Haves and then also Nice to Haves which are important but can do with out if needed or you can wait till that feature comes out. I hope this helps others and Icon Systems is happy to help in the decision making process. IconCMO is not free but is inexpensive.