What Kind of Checkin System Do You Use?

I get this question fairly often. It’s one of those questions that children’s pastors and leaders ask each other.

The Database / Checkin System is BVCMS

I’ve been on the lookout for a full-featured, web-based database system for a while, however our youth and children’s ministry could not afford what the companies were charging. So we settled on local, internal networked based systems, but they never fully met our needs or expectations. I wasn’t looking for the best, I just wanted to be able to:

1. Access information anywhere, via any web-enabled device
2. Send emails out to various lists and ministries
3. Have an easy, simple checkin process
4. Be able to create user accounts for people to manage and update their own information
5. Have an easy event registration system
6. To top it all off, we wanted all of these various functions to talk to each other.

We were doing web-based registration. That’s easy. All it takes is  a simple web-form and the user-input gets emailed to whomever you choose. The problem with this is that our office still had to manually enter that emailed information into a registration document.

We were doing mass emailing through MailChimp… great, great email system… however we had to manage another database there. In order to use MailChimp we had to load emails from our on-site database into that system and then send out messages. It was tough keeping up with all the emails that were “unsubscribed” or “no longer working” etc.

We did have checkin systems before BVCMS, but they were incredibly cumbersome and complicated. I don’t know why, they were.

Enter BVCMS. This church management system provided ALL (and then some) what we were looking for in a database. And it was an easy decision to jump on board. One of the biggest reasons it was an easy decision was because the price was affordable for our youth and children’s ministry budget.

So if you are looking for an affordable and powerful online database (with a smooth checkin process built in) for your church, you should seriously look into BVCMS.

While I am promoting BVCMS, I get no $$ for doing this. BVCMS is an open-source software, which means the actual program is FREE (interesting, eh?). If you have an IT background, you can load and run this software at your own server expense. BVCMS offers a hosting option for churches that do not have professional IT departments, which is where the cost comes in. Because the program is open-sourced, the more people or churches who adopt BVCMS, the more everyone benefits. It’s kind of a self sustaining community that way!