From FellowshipOne:
Fellowship One is a web-based system that allows a church of any size, from new church plants to multi-site mega churches, to be more effective in ministry, more efficient in administration, and to engage the community. Fellowship One provides a unique 360-degree, single view of the families in your church, their involvement and their needs so that you can personalize their care.
Features
If you’re interested, check out the complete feature list
- Total View of the Family:
- Demographics, contact information, notes and more in a single view
- Graphical view of past and planned involvement in church activities
- Quantity and quality of the information you store is improved
- Check-in and Security
- Smooth, organized and efficient check-in and pick-up process
- Intuitive touch-screen interface for use by parents and volunteers
- Works with a bar-code reader or fingerprint scanner
- Community
- Define and manage groups, group leaders, and members
- Monitor the health and activity of your groups ministry
- Members can search for and join a group via your church website
- Giving
- Increase giving and lower administrative costs via online giving or kiosk
- Establish and track progress of pledge drives
- Rapid entry of the offering by scanning and imaging paper checks
Quick Facts
- Pricing: $20/month+. Pricing scale
- Users: 18000
- Platform: Web Based
- Website: http://www.fellowshipone.com
Kyle Kutter says
In 2009, we knew is was time to find a new CMS that would work well behind the scenes with out staff and volunteers but that also looked and played well with all of our church members and attendees. We felt we were lacking in the areas of event registration, online giving, small groups integration, users ability to update information, and the speed of our check in for parents.
I had heard of Fellowship One from respected friends in the church technology field and when I began my own research I found out that all there experiences of the product and service was exactly what The Ark needed.
Some of the big benefits of Fellowship One over the other CMS that we looked at were:
Web Based and browser friendly
Highly intuitive interface for data entry
Always moving forward on technology and its possibility
Attitude of the staff to help create solutions
Full range of reports
Web interface is customizable to our design and brand
Eliminated TONS of man hours
Check In system that is easy to use and fast
and the list goes on and on.
So May 2010, The Ark Church (currently running 3,500-4,000) completed our migration to Fellowship One. Our F1 champion team (F1 leaders made up of members of our staff) is continually asking how we can maximize F1 to help us do more ministry. And now a year later we are even more eager to grow in our use of our CMS.
PS: Your content is only as good as what you put in to it. So, no matter what CMS you use the process for gathering and entering data is SO important.
Taz says
Quick question: What software (if any) do you use in addition to F1 for financial management? I’ve seen briefly how F1 can really help in terms of streamlining the process, but I saw the sales guy in the video say that there’s no ledger.
A little background: I’m moving to a senior admin position in a small church (less than 100 for now) that has been using an antiquated and ineffective process for years. We (the leadership team) are planning to relaunch the church with a fresh start and we want to do it right. The church has come a long way (read: handwritten accounting in the new millenium), but we want to take advantage of the resources available to make church work more efficient.
Kyle Kutter says
Taz,
We maintained the ACS Financial suite. But I know that our finance team is looking at moving it to something different. I have seen some online based softwares like F1 but also have heard them talked about the Microsoft Financial software. (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/)
Kyle
Katie Smith says
We have been with Fellowship One since July 2007, and the impact has been amazing. Prior to that time (with our previous ChMS), we had only a few people that used the system on a regular basis. This was due to the lack of user-friendliness and the lack of options from that sistem. Three years later, we have the majority of our staff using the system on a regular basis. F1 is our main source of communication with our congregation, and the use of group email has cut our mailing budget in half. Weblink has also had a huge impact on our church, allowing us a way to offer online registrations and payments for various ministry events, and the innovative access options (Iphone app, mobile site, etc) offers our ministers a way to access member information easily. At this point, we are able to evaluate the people who come to our church based on the information we are able to collect through F1, which helps us help them grow.
In addition to these benefits, not having to have a dedicated server to house this data is wonderful. At first, we were apprehensive on using a cloud-based system for our member data. However, Fellowship Technologies uses state-of-the-art technology and protection services to provide maximum security for our information. In addition, we do not have to install updates, hope the updates work, or try to correct issues that arise after updates are installed. All of this is provided by Fellowship Technologies.
Lastly, this company truly listens to their church partners. Suggestions and ideas submitted by church partners are taken to heart by the FT staff, and it is nice to know that your opinion truly matters. The customer (church partner) is the heart of this company, and the company totally knows it.
I would truly recommend this system to any church.
Matt Pugh says
About a year ago I was hired on to become our church’s Fellowship One guru to free up another staff member for other responsibilities. I was immediately thrown into the tank with mainly on the job training. With that said, I found it very easy to learn, and picked it up quickly. They have a lot of online training resources that are very helpful in your initial training, as well as for info look up later on down the road.
I quickly realized the power of this CHMS and became the cheerleader in our church for ministries to adopt it over continuing to use their “silos” of data. The downside to this adoption is that ministries already use to their system don’t want to make the change to Fellowship One, as they see it as inhibiting their processes. I write this for this reason; if you are looking for the perfect piece of software to mimic the way you do things, you will never find it. You need to adjust your process to the software and meet it half way.
When it comes to Fellowship One, it does a lot of things really well, and some things to the point of huh? For instance, they recently went live with their Groups 2.0 web portal. On the front side it looks great. It’s an easy way to locate, join, and manage a small group. There are many security and permission levels, allowing lots of customization for how staff and group leaders see what’s going on. The “huh?” factor comes in after registering for the group. Once you are in a group, there’s no meat. There’s no reason to come back to the portal. It would be nice to have attendance tracking and/or some sort of shared experience with in the group setting. I’m told they are working on more functionality, but this sort of not taking an idea completely to completion is a common occurrence with in the software.
Don’t get me wrong, I love it. There are really great things about the software. My favorite is contact items. Once you assign a contact item to an individual, whoever is responsible for that item is immediately notified via email that they need to reach out to that person. Very cool, but would be nice if F1 could take that notification device and apply it to other portions of the system, say the volunteer pipeline? Other cool things F1 brings: Check-in app (would be nice if it was a web app), live check-in (webpage to monitor volunteers and attendees), Volunteer pipeline, and the ability to tweak their structure in a way that makes sense for your church (but sometimes not enough).
Overall, I’m very happy with Fellowship One, but I’m most excited for future upgrades and changes. It will also be cool to see how they continue to integrate with other applications, for example, the table (http://tableproject.org/). If you are looking for a way to kill your data silos (if you’re not, you should be), then Fellowship One will do a great job for you.
Dan Lott says
– In early 2006 we launched an evaluation of church management systems. Our first action was to identify the 15-20 must have major features. We screened over 15 companies and narrowed the list to 4 companies. We then added another 15-20 highly desirable features and solicited proposals from the four. Fellowship’s proposal was evaluated as the most likely to fit. Some of the major attractive features were Internet access, email management, online giving and registration and online check-in. A key requirement was selection of a supplier with sufficient capital and resources to support our rapidly growing church. Fellowship Tech met those requirements.
– We made the decision for Fellowship One and achieved the conversion of 35,000 individuals in 90 days. Since our conversion in 2006 our list has grown to over 80,000 individuals of which 40,000 represent attendees in a one year period.
– One of the pleasant and key surprises is Fellowship support. The support system is well organized and responsive. This is due to both their quality personnel and the system being Software as a Service. When there are problems they are fixed must faster in this environment than when update CD’s are distributed to local network based systems.
– The reporting capability is very strong. The report team is also responsive as requests are made for report improvements.
– Fellowship One presents a good user interface. We adopted a strategy of working hard to understand how the system works. We input enhancement requests knowing that they will typically be a number of months or longer to implement. That works well as the system provides tremendous benefit with its existing functions.
– We are an active user. We send over 100 group emails a month. We typically have 10-15 events open for online registration. We run check-in for children through 6th grade and weekend support volunteers. We have over 70 active portal users.
– Fellowship has met our expectations for functional capability, continuing system enhancements, problem resolution, and performance.
Katie Smith says
Taz,
We kept Shelby Financials because of its reliability. However, I have friends at another F1 church who use and love IntAcct. It is cloud based and works well with F1.
Katie
Matt Shaughnessy says
We’ve had a mixed experience with Fellowship One. Their software has worked really well for managing our database, but it didn’t deliver nearly as well as advertised in the financial, reporting, and groups areas. The giving module works well if you’re PC-based, but the only compatible check scanner won’t work on a Mac (we’re a non-PC staff so that was out). The groups function is nice, but is disconnected from the main database so there’s no way for a portal user to follow up on group contacts like you would on a contact within the system. Also while Dan Lott mentioned a good experience with reporting, we’ve had a really bad experience – custom reports have to be generated by the F1 team and we’ve waited a month or longer for reports to be generated. I have had some poor experiences with their support team as well.
It seems good for large churches, but for smaller churches with decentralized leadership/organization it doesn’t work as well.