Great work Tim! Can you elaborate more on some things and see if I can use your app to replace some of our current tools?
My church as a whole is actually using http://www.churchcommunitybuilder.com/ as a directory and it's not that fun to use, although some ministries within the church are more effective with it than others.
I lead the digital video & post production team at my church and we are using a mix mash of Church Community Builder, Facebook group, Google mass email thread and an ugly spreadsheet to keep track of our volunteers attendance, schedule them and communicate the serving opportunities each week. How does the attendance tracking work in your app and would it work for something like this to track volunteers and schedule them to serve?
One reason we have not moved off the CCB platform yet is they have a built in way for the church body to easily send online tithes & donations. Do you have any plans to work that in to your app?
I'm not very familiar with churchcommunitybuilder so I can't say.
As for scheduling volunteer and such, you should definitely check out Planning Center Services app (that's what I work on for my day job) - it is by far the best app for that sort of thing.
OneBody doesn't have any scheduling or giving stuff yet, sorry!
About the only thing OneBody might do for you in your situation would be to help with emailing all your volunteers. You could put them in separate "Groups" (per time, service, whatever) and then email that group at once. Then you could track attendance in that after the fact.
It's used primarily by small groups that meet in homes or whatever - that way the church as a whole can engage with anyone who stops attending (sometimes sign of personal/life issues that the church should be there to help with).
Well, yes the small group itself should notice and act, but it's also nice to have an overall picture of the health of your small groups and class participation.
We have an "Involvement Minister" who watches churn rate so to speak, so hopefully he can help organize better/different small groups or help improve existing ones.
I don't know every conceivable reason why a church would track attendance, but one reason: churches that use / sing "cover songs" (i.e., not public domain, not original compositions) need to pay licensing for the songs, and one of the variables on how much the licensing costs is the average number of people in attendance.
it is difficult. there are a few legitimate reasons and at least one questionable reason i can think of off the top of my head.
attendance tracking would be good for "care" ("hey - it's been a while, is everything ok?"), for decision-making ("we average 35 people at 8am but 400 at 10:30am, what should we do?").
unfortunately, i can also see it used to target "marketing" messages for donations.
That's pretty common in churches. Each Sunday school group will submit a number, and someone will count attendance during the main joined service. The totals will be published in the next week's bulletin, along with total contributions from the week and perhaps year-to-date contributions. Some churches even announce those attendance numbers and compare them to the same week one year ago.
I probably should highlight more of that stuff on the site... thanks!