Managing a parish isn’t easy, but it’s an important job. The church is often the center of an entire community, be it a single neighborhood or even an entire town, and keeping the administration-side running smoothly is a major challenge. Luckily, modern productivity tools like customer resource management platforms are ideal for busy parishes looking for a way to automate busy-work, streamline operations, and make it easier to maintain a strong connection with members on an individual level. 

 

Supercharge Your Charity and Parish Collection

Charity is at the heart of a strong parish, and effective donation management is key to ensuring that the best work possible can be done in the local community. Collecting cash donations has traditionally been the go-to method for charity drives and weekly collection, but handling cash is both inefficient and risky in some ways. Moving to electronic donation collection not only streamlines the donation-handling process, but it also makes it much easier for parish members to give whenever they feel like it, even right from home. 

A good customer resource management tool like CRMDialer enables electronic payment processing from right within the software, meaning donations can be taken over the phone or online in addition to traditional in-person collections. Donations can be automatically tied to each parishioner’s account to facilitate easy follow-ups and thank you notes, and to make it as easy as possible for church administrators to handle the issuing of charity tax receipts. 

 

Manage Your Parishioners on a Personal Level

A parish is a community, and it’s incredibly important for each and every member of a church to feel like part of the family. That’s relatively easy to accomplish in smaller parishes, but as congregation size grows, it becomes more and more difficult to keep up with each member’s lives. For larger congregations, utilizing productivity tools to help manage everyone on a more personal level is key. 

Customer resource management tools enable member accounts to be created for each parishioner, and those accounts can be used to keep track of all the relevant information necessary to provide a more personalized church-going experience. Important dates like anniversaries or birthdays can be easily stored, notifications and outgoing communications can be automatically scheduled, and information from contacts like phone calls, emails, or in-person meetings can be automatically tied to the relevant accounts. The result is no member of the parish ever feeling like they’ve been forgotten. 

 

Streamline Your Communications and Maintain Constant Contact

Communication is everything, and maintaining constant contact with members of a parish is one of the best ways to maintain community, keep weekly attendance numbers up, and ensure that every parishioner is properly taken care of. In-person contact will always be the cornerstone of any church community, but phone calls and email are a great way to stay in contact in between services. Unfortunately, in larger parishes, regularly calling or emailing an entire congregation can be incredibly time-consuming. 

Customer resource management platforms like CRMDialer streamline the communication process by bringing all communication mediums into a single point of control. CRMDialer includes a full communication suite, including Gmail and Outlook integration and a fully-featured power dialer, so that parish staff can easily reach out to members with a few easy clicks. The built-in email marketing platform also makes it possible to pre-schedule emails written in advance, so that communications for significant dates, events, or special collections can be sent out automatically.