Today, everything in the United States is licensed, issued, owned, and/or copyrighted. Unless your church is always creating original content for every service, your likely using someone else's copyrighted work. US Copyright laws create great confusion in general, and the church exemption adds to the confusion. Every church is exempt from US Copyright law to perform live music during their regular weekly religious service(s). That means you can hold worship during your service(s) each week with … [Read more...]
Wisdom Over Wealth
We have a Massachusetts based company called Wisdom Over Wealth do our taxes (for our staff) and perform an annual church audit (well, the church version of an audit anyways). Here's what I like about them: The founder and CEO, Bill O'Connell, is a great guy. They have extensive experience doing ministers taxes. They are reasonably priced. Before switching to Wisdom Over Wealth I was paying an arm and a leg for tax services. I have peace of mind knowing that I'll never be on the front … [Read more...]
Choosing a Website
When we first started New Day I built our first website myself on my Mac. This is not how I would recommend starting, but this is how we started. As the church grew I transferred everything over to a company that offered templates for a nominal monthly fee (can't remember their name right now). My main reason for switching was that the new site looked more professional. The new site was inexpensive but had limited features, so as the church continued to grow I eventually switched us over to Site … [Read more...]
How We Use Fellowship One
When I was in my senior pastor coaching network with Nelson Searcy, over the course of the four years I heard the following repeated a number of times: Fellowship One is the best of the worst. What I understood this to mean is that no church management software does exactly what you want it to, but that Fellowship One comes closest. Here's what I like about it: At New Day we always try our best to build on proven foundations (things proven to work well by others) and as I looked into it, … [Read more...]
How We Use Planning Center
We use Planning Center to: Schedule musicians and singers for Sunday. One month out the songs are chosen for each service and added within Planning Center. Then a request is sent to each volunteer, who can either confirm or deny availability for the week(s) they are needed. Schedule our production team (the people who run the computer, soundboard, lights, video cameras, etc.) Each week a request is sent to each volunteer, who can either confirm or deny availability for the upcoming … [Read more...]
How & Why We Use Constant Contact
Constant Contact is an online email marketing company. Once our mailing list got bigger than my personal email could handle, I got a subscription to Constant Contact. At New Day we like to build on proven foundations, and after doing some research I discovered Constant Contact was a staple email marketing company, used by many of the churches I was trying to learn from at the time. Here's what we use Constant Contact for at New Day: To send a weekly email to our church. Included in the email … [Read more...]