These worries are natural, but they’re also completely avoidable with the right approach to implementing new technology. You can set your church up for a successful software implementation with these simple steps!
Before you actually go about implementing your new technology at your church, you’ll need to ensure that you have all your existing data prepped for the upcoming migration. Usually, exporting your data in a plain-text format such as a CSV file is your best bet; it keeps your information organized and allows for easy upload into new formats.
If you’ve been organizing your data in Excel or Google Sheets, you can easily export your sheets as CSV files. If you’ve been using an existing church management software, you might need to look more into how you can export your data into a format that your new software will accept.
The support team for your new church management software can help you ensure your data is in a format that will easily transfer with minimal errors. If you’re migrating from one software to another, you can talk with both support teams to figure out a migration prep plan.
Once you’ve prepped your data, you’ll likely go through an onboarding process with the support team of your new technology. This process is designed to help you get the most out of your software and help ensure everything is set up correctly so you can hit the ground running.
During onboarding, you might have multiple virtual meetings with your support contact, where they’ll walk you through migrating your data, as well as show you the different features of the program and how your church can utilize them. It’s an opportunity for you and the key players on your team to ask questions about use cases specific to your church. They can help you set up custom fields, show you work-arounds, and help you problem-solve so that the program works best for your church.
The best step you can take for a painless software transition is to spend ample time training your staff and volunteers to deeply understand the software and how they can use it in their role. This might be part of the onboarding process with your support team; be sure to ask if they offer this! It will save you valuable time and money if you don’t need to do it yourself.
If you need supplemental training for your staff, consider training teams as needed—for example, you would train your finance team on only the financial part of your software. Some staff members, like administrators, might need to understand how all parts of the software work to do their job effectively. You’ll need to figure out what is best for each team in your workforce!
As you go about your church software implementation, the next step will be to start rolling out your new technology to your members! Before you onboard your entire congregation into the software (more on that next), we recommend running some pilot groups with select groups of members.
Depending on the size of your congregation, these groups might be a larger or smaller sample size. Either way, try to involve 10–15 people per group (or total) to get a good sample size. The people in your group should be varied in age, life stage, and level of technological understanding.
These pilot groups are a chance for you to see how people react to the new software, as well as how the implementation process goes on the member side of things. Perhaps during your pilot group, you have multiple people note that they were confused on how to set up their account. This gives you valuable information that you can address before you roll out the software across your congregation!
Now comes the exciting part—actually rolling out the software! However, we recommend that you don’t roll everything out at once. Doing this will result in overwhelm for you and your staff, and could contribute to people unintentionally doing things incorrectly.
You’ve likely already rolled out the software to your staff and volunteers, which is the recommended first step in a phased rollout. Make sure your teams are comfortable with their end of things, so they can answer any questions your members might have when it comes time for them to jump in. This also allows you to work out any back-end bugs and ensure your processes are running smoothly.
When you roll out the software to your congregation, you might consider doing it in phases as well. First, you could just have them set up their accounts with their information. Don’t ask them to do anything else in the software; keep it simple and just have them set up their accounts.
Then, maybe a month later, you can implement eGiving and encourage your members to switch their giving. After that, maybe you start using the calendar feature to share your upcoming events and coordinate registrations and volunteer sign-ups. Lastly, maybe you set up secure groups for prayer requests or for Bible study members to chat in.
You’ll want to keep in mind that how you publicly communicate about this new technology can have a significant impact on how your staff and members adopt it! It’s important to be transparent about why you’re making this switch—maybe it will save your church money, maybe it will streamline administrative tasks, maybe it will allow you to engage more with your members. Or maybe it will do all of the above!
Be sure to communicate all changes thoroughly with your members. You don’t want anyone caught off guard that they have to switch their old way of doing things! Make announcements about the transition months in advance across multiple platforms—in your in-person announcements, printed bulletin, and weekly email newsletter.
Encourage your members to bring their concerns or questions directly to you or the point person for this transition. You can assuage their worries and answer their questions with ease to make for an easy transition!
Implementing new technology doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With Concordia Technology Solutions, our in-house team is ready to support your church every step of the way with onboarding assistance, training, data migration guidance, and live support. See how Church360° Members can help you connect with your congregation while simplifying administrative work.