Pastor Joe Schmoe has a problem: His laptop is toast.
Every time he tries to listen to the latest Wow worship compilation CD, he cannot hear the sound. Whatever will he do? Jane Schmoe (no relation to pastor Schmoe) is the church secretary. Her problem? She printed out too many email forwards (and a couple of lolcats) and her printer is out of ink.
Pastor Schmoe likes to call you, his one and only IT tech, at home around dinner time. Jane has no idea who to call, so she goes out and buys ink but has no idea how to get it into the printer. She calls your wife and passive-aggressively complains about the printer never working.
There’s got to be a better way…!
How About This?
For just a measly $5000-$10,000 (per year with contracted maintenance agreement) you could buy some help desk software.
Oh, and you will need another 5k for a server.
Wait, you don’t really have a network because your church is too small and you run all of your email off of Google aps and a Netgear router which you paid waaaaaaay too much for because you though “draft N” was good enough (/end run on sentence)?
I think not.
Enter: Web Helpdesk
Web Helpdesk kills several birds with one tiny little stone. For small churches, that stone is free.
Web Helpdesk is a web-based solution that can grow with your church. It starts out completely free for one technician and unlimited users and service requests.
For many churches (those 200 in attendance and below), this is a good thing. Churches from 80-200 people average about 5 staff members* and several leaders / elders / deacons who tend to use and break technological devices.
Once you begin to add technicians, you can grow the service by paying a monthly update fee (currently $200-300 per technician including server space, with Non-profit discount).
Just Give Me Some Features!
The feature set changes from the free, lite, and pro editions. All editions allow for LDAP syncing and email subscriptions.
When you get into the lite version, you start to add things like SLA times, reporting, SMS messages, and technician groups. Pro offers a host of features like; billing rates, inventory, and audit controls. Since it is web based, there is no need to worry about platform since all capable browsers can access it.
Serious About Help
You might be thinking:
I only have ten staff members (or less), why do I need this?
Basically, you are starting to put reasonable standards into play for the future. If you start your churches IT department with processes and procedures, people will know what level of support to expect. In turn, it keeps you organized from the start and makes your ministry, as an IT guy or gal, more effective (or is it affective…?).
Using helpdesk software also keeps you in touch with your end users. They know you are simply an email away, which can cut down on those phone calls at dinner time.
Using something like Web Helpdesk can help your software grow with your church. This means there is no need to purchase an expensive contract or hardware to offer outstanding service.
Do you Help Desk?
Is your church currently using a Help Desk software of any kind? What is the cost? Has it helped or hindered your relationship with the end user? Let us know in the comments. Anyone know of any open source solutions (I’m looking at you, oschurch)?
*This statistic is completely fabricated by me based on experiences with smaller churches. No science or math was used or harmed during this fabrication.
Stuart says
What’s wrong with Spiceworks then? It’s free and includes a helpdesk amongst its many offerings.
Don Dudley says
Spiceworks is nice looking, never used it. Do you have to use your own server / network in order to set it up?
Stuart says
You are correct – it does require local resources but is “web ish” based as it’s all run through a browser after being installed – though a server is not required but a machine that is designated as the spiceworks admin box.
I’v had a chance to look now and the features for WebHelpDesk are very mpressive.
Don Dudley says
In turn, I have checked out spiceworks and I have to say, it is impressive as well.
kennysnow says
I really like the idea of a company that gives help to small churches, I know many churches running with a part time volunteer I.T. person, and it seems a great solution to that.
However, in an environment with a more established position, I would highly recommend trying Spiceworks if you have any kind of computer that can be used as a local server. It’s completely free (sponsored by ads) and is VERY easy to install. Our team uses it on a daily basis – it keeps hardware/software inventory automatically (makes audits easy!), keeps all of our service provider info (that way no one person has the emergency info), runs our tech help ticking system (no more hallway “could you just look at this real quick?”), and now has a user portal where you can post known issues, FAQs, instructions for common issues, etc. In short, it is an amazing, free product that is continually updated. I tried many solutions before that one, and nothing has come close (to be completely fair, I have not tried WebHelpDesk, but I feel there is no need to look elsewhere!) Browser based too, so you can bring it up at any local desktop.
Almost forgot, it has a built-in community for all kinds of technology questions. Can’t beat it IMO!
The only thing about Spiceworks, it’s only going to run as fast as the machine it’s running on…the database keeps a lot of info, so if you have a good server I’d run it off of that for the best speed experience. That would be the benefit of the completely web-based solution, but once you grow to a certain size it would seem more cost beneficial to utilize a server on campus that you’ll need for other resources anyway.
Bill says
We use Web Help Desk in our organization. It definitely a culture-shift to encourage folks who do the hallway stop or throw a “gotta a minute” your way. But, any solution helps funnel those not so urgent and urgent tasks to a place you can track. It helps establish history, patterns and reports. It also does a great job tracking inventory. We use the advanced features as well, including the ties to LANRev.
Bill says
That fee is extrodinary per technician. Look at RemedyDesk @ $69/technician if you have Money to spend.
If you are 80-200 members then SpiceWorks is the way to go. We use it on a (non-church) network with 800 users and thousands of devices.
Eric Dye says
Thanks, Bill!