Church Admin Plugin

Category: News

  • Best Membership Software for Churches

    Best Membership Software for Churches

    Church membership software allows church leaders and administrators to keep track of church membership, organise effective follow up of visitors and organise pastoral care well.

    With today’s concerns about data privacy, people’s personal data needs to be held securely and options given for privacy settings. The Church Admin plugin does all these things well. It’s designed to help small, medium and large churches oranise and administrate their membership efficiently.

    Church Membership tracking

    The Church Admin Plugin for church websites powered by WordPress has effective tools for church membership.

    Sunday Visitors can be added to the system via the admin area by logged in church administrators, or a page or post can be created which allows for people to register themselves and edit their entries. The plugin can be set to require admin approval of new accounts.

    You can set up member levels – my church uses the following membership types

    • Mailing List – people who just want to be kept inthe loop about what is going on in church life.
    • Visitor – for first time visitors. The welcome team can then send an SMS or email welcome and they are on the first level of our follow up funnel.
    • Irregular Attender – this level is for people who come irregularly. We send emails/SMS to people on this level to invite them to special services and events.
    • Regular Attender – this membership level is for people who are regular but haven’t come to a joining day yet.
    • Member – this level is people who have completed our membership process and are members of the church.

    The membership levels are used in our follow up funnels to help people be assimilated fully into church life. They can be used for targetting email and SMS to different groupings in the church.

    Follow Up

    You can create followup funnels, which are taskes to guide people allow the process from being a first time visitor to a member of the church. Church Admin Plugin also has automations – automated emails that can be sent when people register and so on.

    Privacy

    People can set their privacy level – whether thay receive mail, email, SMS or phone calls. They can set photo permissions and want details if any appear on address lists.

    Address List

    You can create a page or post with the church address list – setting which member levels are shown. By default this is a login only feature to safeguard people’s privacy. Family and individual privacy settings are respected too.

    Communications

    The Church Admin Plugin has powerful communication tools.

    Out of the box, emails can be sent using the native WordPress functions, although we recommend using Mailersend to handle sending the emails (website sent email are often flagged as spam routinely). Mailersend are free for 3,000 emails per month and their basic plan is $1 per extra 1,000 emails in a month.

    You can also integrated an SMS sending service to send targeted SMS messages using Twilio, BulkSMS, Textmagic, or CloudeService Zambia. Twilio are our preferred partner as they allow reply messages to be handle through the plugin.

    For Premium version users – there is an app for smartphones and tablets that allows you to send Push Notifications to everyone or targeted users.

    Pastoral Visitation

    The pastoral visitation module allows you to schedule pastoral visitation with reminders to take care of visiting the flock.

    This post has highlighted just some of the featurs of the Church Admin Plugin, making it the best church membership management software for small and large churches.

    The free version includes the address list module. There are basic and standard versions taht offer more functionality. The premium version is a competitively priced $99 per year and opens up the giving module for PayPal and Stripe online giving, the app and other features.

    There’s a discount code to CRM25 offering 25% off

  • Keeping maps updated when users change their address

    I love having the maps working!

    I find the map and directions links particularly useful on the Our Church app when I want to visit someone.They also allow you to show your church location, small groups and address list maps on your website.

    If you haven’t got mapping working yet, then there is a tutorial on setting it up here.

    Recently I have noticed that when people have moved and updated their address on the app – the map pin hasn’t moved. Same if they did it on the website and didn’t click “Update the map”. So….

    On the website  registration page, the map is updated if the user clicks Update or when they have finished filling out the address field.

    On the app, a needs geocoding flag is set when someone registers or updates their address.

    That will look like this on the Church Admin dashboard…

    Clicking “Update mapping now” will sort it out!

    If you don’t yet have the app, the maps and directions buttons are one of my favourite features. Add that to that your sermons, service schedules, calendar, push notifications, Bible readings, prayer requests, online giving and a church app licence for a one off $99 or £75 is well worth having. I’ll even help you get it set up if you need the support!
    Click on the app screenshot below to buy now!

  • The best app to turn your iPhone into a live-streaming camera

    The best app to turn your iPhone into a live-streaming camera

    In this crazy year we have all been taking our churches online. Back in March 2020 it was nigh on impossible to buy a webcam – they were sold out! I bought one that still hadn’t arrived 8 weeks later, got a refund and then it arrived and it was so poor quality it went in the bin anyway.

    I tried a couple of the free apps to turn my iPhone into webcam. Most of them were truly awful. By relying on wifi there was a lot of latency – delay. But worse the audio was out of sync with the video which is really distracting.

    So I finally bit the bullet and bought Camera for OBS – which cost me GBP £15.99. I’m so glad I did. It is perfect! It needed a plugin download for OBS which was a breeze to install. The documentation to do that in the link above was a breeze to follow and it worked first time.

    I’ve tested it on my Mac and it worked well. We livestream using our brand new Huawei Matebook 14 – which has been a game changer as it is powerful enough to do the job well. It took a little more setting up as on a Windows PC you need to install iTunes as well as the OBS camera plugin software. We live-streamed with it today and I’m very happy with the quality difference

    This is a 5star app!

    You can purchase it from the iOS App store.

    Let me know how you get on!

  • PayPal giving fund

    PayPal giving fund


    For UK Churches there is a PayPal giving fund, where there are no charges on any online donations made to your church. Donors can also opt to Gift Aid what they give which will give their gifts a 25% boost from the government.

    You’ll need a Church PayPal account – which has been verified as a Charity account (which reduces fees on normal transactions too). That took a while – for us largely because the Letter of Authorisation you have to download, print and sign needs to be on headed paper to be accepted!

    If you have a church PayPal account – then start enrolling here – it will take you to the verification pages if needed as part of sign up.

  • Service pre-booking

    I’ve just created a YouTube video on how to set up service pre-booking on your WordPress website using the Church Admin plugin