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, Fellowship One was the proven foundation, the software that most of the big churches out there use.
- The cost depends on the size of your church. The smaller you are the cheaper it is, so you don’t have to have a huge budget to get started with Fellowship One.
- It’s scalable. Even if you grow to thousands, you don’t have to switch church management systems.
- You can begin building a spiritual history of sorts for each person at your church. You can make record in their account of what events they attended, where they have served, what growth groups they have joined, etc. And if you have a growth track type disciple process, you can easily record if people have completed class 101, 201, 301 or 401.
And here is what I don’t like about Fellowship One:
- It’s not very intuitive. If I had to compare it to a Mac or a PC, I’d compare it to a PC.
- Even though the cost depends on the size of the church, it’s still quite expensive.
- You have to pay for training vs getting free tutorials that would help you get going.
- There are way, way, way, way, way too many options. As good as the food is at The Cheesecake Factory, I hate going there because there are too many options to choose from. The menu is more like a book than a menu! That’s what Fellowship One is like – too many options.
But as I said, it’s the best of the worst, so if you’re looking for church management software, Fellowship One is the way to go.
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