I wrote in Church Software Continuum that I think software tools for engagement are missing. You could argue that it's more a matter of confusing and/or ambiguous terminology. Regardless, I think current tools do a poor job of helping shepherds to connect with visitors and members.

I don't want to build another rigid Church Management System. Instead, I want to build a Church Engagement System that deals more with people and connections than anything else. The differences may be subtle, but the result could be profound.

Over the next few posts, I'll be giving a broad overview of what I think will make this system different from what's already out there. First, rigidity vs flexibility...

Church management deals with data points that tend to be rigid. I envision a system that deals with engagement being more flexible:

Let me explain a few of these ideas...

Approximate Dates

The ability to enter an approximate date or timeframe in addition to known, exact dates. 

• Jane White volunteered for college ministry in August 2011.
• John Smith hasn't been seen at church in about three weeks.

The idea is to encourage data entry that may help ministry, no matter how incomplete/imprecise it may be.

Tags

This may not need much explanation, since many web apps organize things with tags and their use is more and more commonplace.

Tags can be used to organize people by:

• class and small group
• age group
• interest
• geographic region/campus
• more?

Tags are generally more flexible because they can be created on the fly and aren't restricted to a hierarchy. Given good tools for querying and manging tags, I think their use can aid ad-hoc grouping and discovery.

A more specialized type of tag is a "flag", which we'll discuss next...

Engagement Stream

I want to take the Facebook-style activity stream and turn it on its head -- The Engagement Stream will list connections that need to be made and ministry needs sorted by time, from the present at the top into the future as you scroll down the page.

How do people make their way onto this list? That's where "flags" come into play -- people get flagged by leaders and staff and volunteers in various ways, which causes those people to be added to the engagement stream. Think of it as a sort of to-do list for ministry.

Some flags may be very manual, such as "contact-needed" and "hospital-visit", while others can be automatically created by the system, such as "three-week-visitor-followup" and "new-small-group-leader" based on other interactions with the app.

Some flags represent high priority needs, causing those connections to bubble to the top of the list.

I think flagging and the Engagement Stream will be an intuitive way for leaders to recognize and make connections, since the idea of streaming activity is already well known thanks to Facebook and Twitter.

Lots of Users and Lay Leaders

My vision doesn't stop with office staff and ministers; it extends out to all kinds of leaders, Sunday School teachers, small group leaders, and more. This tool will be as powerful (or more powerful) for lay leaders who are engaging with their own sphere of influence.

Since this tool's main focus is on action (the present) -- not data (the past) -- we can extend the tool out to lots of people with more openness than a traditional ChMS.

...

This is just some my ideas. I won't pretend this alone is a game changer; execution and user experience will be just as (or more) important.

Thanks for reading, as always. If you have feedback or ideas, please post a comment here, catch me on Twitter (@seven1m), or let's discuss in the IRC room (#church.io on Freenode).