Posted by mfer on May 30, 2007 at 1:54pm
Does anyone know of a good setup for tracking church members, attendance, finances, etc. with all the bells and whistles that a church could use?
My first image was drupal with civicrm. Anyone have any experience with this? Or, know of something else?
Comments
Powerchurch
Our church currently uses a proprietary package called Powerchurch. I'm not at all impressed with it, but it does seem to do the job that's required of it in our congregation. I would like to see our church move to CiviCRM. In fact one of the reasons I recommended moving to Drupal for our website was to facilitate the eventual move to CiviCRM.
da bling
Churches do envelopes, track giving over the year, store that info for years, and print those tax writeoff slips at the end of the year. Any system to change to really needs these. Any clue if civicrm does this stuff?
Pretty sure the answer is yes to all the above.
They're exceptionally responsive those CiviCRM guys. I posted an offhand comment one time to one of their forums, and within a day or two had a private email from one of the folks with commit access. I was impressed! They have separate modules like "civicontribute" that handle all that sort of thing. They even have it localized for the requirements of multiple countries. It's been a while since I looked at it closely, because our church was clearly not yet ready to make the transition, but I remember thinking that there was nothing that Powerchurch was doing for us that CiviCRM couldn't do as well or better, plus CiviCRM had a ton of other features.
It gets poor reviews from themers and coders because it doesn't use some of the more standard Drupal APIs and so on. Some folks at Trellon are currently involved in a project to remedy that situation, I think.
CiviCRM church distro :)
yeah we do try to listen and respond to feedback quite proactively :)
regarding civicrm for churches, here are my 2 cents:
I think we cover a lot of the base functionality needed.
civicrm does a fair amount of donation tracking. however, it is NOT an accounting system :).
CiviCRM is a good start, however to make it more specific and effective, would be good for one (or more) churches to group together and develop the missing pieces. Since we dont have much domain knowledge about that, we can help / guide the group, but the group will need to step up and contribute resources.
We support multiple CMS's. In addition to drupal we also support Joomla. So it is hard for us to use only Drupal API's
lobo
See what I mean?
Talk about a live demo of reponsiveness to community input--Sheesh!
Our church actually uses a separate accounting system (which is every bit as awkward as Powerchurch) so that's really not the issue. In fact, if that becomes an issue, there's some good work happening elsewhere in the Drupal community looking at Quickbooks integration. Once again, don't know much about it, but clearly there are many people "out there" who speak both Drupal and Quickbooks, for example. We (and many other churches) only use the "church software" to keep track of donations, print tax receipts, and log other significant events like baptisms, weddings, births and deaths. Oh ya, we also print (and I mean print on paper) a congregational directory (phonebook) once a year or so.
If we did use CiviCRM (and I hope we soon will) we'll be able to do so much more!
One of the side effects of our local congregation's project is to try to create that momentum for churches (specifically those within our denomination and geography) to band together and start to reach consensus on "developing" the missing pieces. Personally, I think what is needed is not so much "development" in the sense of php coding, but more development of an understanding of how the features already present in CiviCRM and Drupal can meet the needs of most congregations just as they stand. They need help with the technology adoption part of it, and task oriented user documentation. Those seem to be the main "missing pieces" if you will. We're working on some of those right now. Stay tuned!
I didn't mean to be critical of your choices around APIs, I was just sort of trying to explain how I interpret some of the (infrequent) criticism I see of CiviCRM. Dan from Trellon presented a cool solution to this issue at DrupalcampToronto a couple of weeks ago. I'm looking forward to seeing where that goes.
ChurchInfo
Looks like the open source ChurchInfo does a lot of what you're after, but having read the other comments about CiviCRM, I'm not sure it ChurchInfo does this stuff any better than CiviCRM.
UI and documentation.
I've toyed with the idea of adding CivicCRM to our exisiting church Drupal site.
Currently we are using a custom developed web Directory that we could replace with CivicCRM
But a few things are missing that keep me from making the leap:
It is kind of a cluttered UI and would take some training to get others used to working with it.
There doesn't seem to be any integration between the CivicCRM groups and organic groups for Drupal 5. If that was in place it would be a killer feature - almost enough to overcome #3,4 below.
Our current system allows different people to be in different groups - with unique roles in each group (leader/teacher/member/student/etc) - We need to alter CivicCRM to be able to do that.
Our current system allows each group to have automatic, recurring, reminders to be emailed out. (reminders for Children's ministry teachers, setup team members, etc). So the recipients of the reminder emails are dynamically generated by the group membership. We need to alter CivicCRM to be able to do that.
There are many other systems out there that can do these things and more that may be a better fit than CivicCRM - esspecially if their UI and documentation is specifically tailored for churches.
So I guess the main factors missing from CivicCRM are UI, documentation, and a few features.
Steve T.
your module
Steve,
Is your web directory module publicly available? It sounds like what I am looking for.
Jeremy
Not a module
Unfortunately it is not a module - it is a separate php application build on cakePHP.
Sometime I may work on a module to integrate it with Drupal (with og esspecially) - or find someway to use it with Drake.