Church Admin Plugin

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  • Creating an invitational culture

    Creating an invitational culture

    The big surprise in my secular, indifferent nation is that 55% of friends that we have a conversation about faith feel more positive about Jesus afterwards (Talking Jesus Report). 96% want to know more! The reality is that many people will come to a special service if asked personally, yet most of us aren’t asking.

    How do we create a culture of invitation?

    Before the event

    Leaders need to set the pace. In the run up to Christmas, leaders need to be talking and praying about who they will invite.

    Do an audit of how welcoming your church really is. You can use this “How welcoming is your church?” PDF. Maybe you could ask a non-church attending friend to do it for you 😉

    Assume your Sunday attenders will be coming to the carol services, so don’t expend energy in the notices section trying to get them to come! Use the notices to share about invite friends. every meeting host should be saying who they will invited.

    “I’m inviting my neighbour John to encounter God’s love”

    “I’ve been taling to Sue at the gym about church and I’m inviting her to the carol service”

    This year, we are going to film a testimony of someone who became a Christian after responding to an invite to a carol service and then doing Alpha. We’ll show it in small groups and one Sunday in November.

    Produce some postcard flyers for people to give to friends.

    Make sure they have the what, where, when on them (i always put a little simple map on flyers. Even if pople know where teh churhc building is, it is anothetr trigger – read that in Gladwell’s book “The Tipping Point “)

    Also have some digital images for people to share and put in WhatsApp messages, social media posts and email.

    I always check the best social media images size or just choose the Canva size- you can check out the current best sizes for yourself.

    We always create a Christmas page on our website and use a good thumbnail image for it with the details of the service. Then check the post URL in the Facebook Share debugger and tweak until it looks the best!

    During the event

    As part of our welcome to the service we thank guests for responding to the invite to come (maybe there will be a gospel response at the end!) and we thank people for inviting their friends.

    Explain what will be happening and watch out for churchy jargon.

    Response – plan your response for the end.

    We have a little card in our welcome packs with a free pen for people to fill out if they want to keep in touch. One of the surprises in the “Quiet Revival” is the uptick in people wanting to read the Bible. Perhaps you could offer free Bibles for the response cards. I have even had someone my son describes as a streetwise gangster ask for a Bible this weekend. I keep a stock of new Testaments!

    After the event

    Get in touch with everyone who filled out a response card and invite them back to church.

    Thanks the church for being so inviting, let them know how many came and how many guests there were.

  • Christmas is coming!

    Christmas is coming!

    I hate it when shops put Christmas product out to early. Although with stretched budgets, I get why people may want to spread the cost. Of course, that then raises questions about whether spending a lot on Christmas is really missing the point.

    Now, is the time church leaders and ministry teams need to begin planning Christmas guest services. We have found that all of our new Christ followers, first came to church for a Christmas service. That means that services over Christmas are a key drive for evangelism to reach new people to encounter Jesus Christ.

    Church Admin makes planning easier

    I have just updated the premium plugin, so that you can schedule multiple services on the same day, because St Johns Church realised their two Christmas carol services weren’t both showing. Do get in touch if you spot a bug or would like a new feature!

    It is worth having an “Ad hoc” service setup, then you can create schedules for those random services like weddings, funerals and… multiple Christmas carol services.

    As you get ready for the Christmas season, make sure the premium plugin is updated to the latest version, so that you can plan and communicate those special services, where lots of people are involved!

    The Gift Exchange

    Over the next few days, I will be posting what we have learned about creating an invitational culture for “high Sundays” (high in the sense there will be high numbers ofguests).

    Then I will be posting our Christmas sermon series outline, a drama sketch and Canva template for flyers for “the gift exchange”


    How to get the Church Admin Plugin for your WordPress powered website.

    The Church Admin Plugin is available in two versions – free from the WordPress plugin repository, or premium with all the features at low cost. You can upgrade from within the free version on your website or buying here and installing.

    Free Version

    The free version of the Church Admin plugin gives you a powerful CRM generating your address list; the calendar module and sermon podcasting tools.

    Premium Version

    Manage your address list, calendar, rotas (schedules), communication tools, sermon podcasting, ticketed events plus the Our Church app, child protection, online PayPal And Stripe giving forms and more.

    A full list of premium features is on our feature comparison page.

    Or upgrade now…

    Choose upgrade subscription

  • Mileage Expenses

    I log all my church mileage, visiting people, meetings, conference, every single mile – which is all tax deductible in the UK.

    So a while back I created simple mileage tracker app, to allow me to enter mileage, journey reason and the date and then get monthly or annual PDF and CSV for either claiming or putting on my tax return. It has saved me hundreds in tax each year!

    Some users track their fuel economy too – the app allows you to do that with miles/kilometres and US Gallons/Imperial Gallons or Litres. You can find out more and go to the App Store link at www.simplemileagetracker.com. This app is a one off purchase – all the other mileage apps I know of have expensive subscriptions attached.

  • Acts – helping your church share faith

    Acts – helping your church share faith

    A recent survey in the UK found that 67% of Christians find it hard to share their faith.

    We are called to make disciples, but often getting out of our Christian bubble to share life with non Christians, sharing our something of our faith and sharing Jesus is hard! When things are hard, they become less of a priority. The best way to make something happen in your life is to write down what you want to do,when you want to do it by and then set a reminder! That is exactly what ACTS is for.

    You can set ACTS to

    Share life – taking steps to build genuine relationships with people who don’t yet know the Lord.

    Share faith – taking steps to bring faith into your friendships, by for example sharing your story, offering prayer or mentioning church as part of what you did last weekend.

    Share Jesus – taking steps to invite your friend to encounter Jesus.

    Here’s an introductory video explaining more…

    The feature is available on the Our Church App and as a shortcode or block from Premium version 5.1.47.

    Here’s some more videos explaining how to do each step of share life, share faith and share Jesus.

    The ACTS tool is available with the premium version of the plugin and on the app. For a full list of what going premium will do – please check our the feature comparison page.

    We have price points for subscriptions to suit small and larger churches, making Church Admin the most cost effective way to use technology to serve your church.

    Choose upgrade subscription

  • Change to roles and Permissions in Church Admin Plugin

    I have made a few changes to the module permissions in Church Admin.

    For example the “Bulk Email” permission is split into “Bulk Email”, “Bulk SMS” and “Push”.

    When upgrading to v4.5.0, please check Church Admin / Settings / Roles or Permissions to make sure they are what you want them to be! Administrator level logins can still do anything.

  • 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

  • The best WordPress Plugins for Churches

    The best WordPress Plugins for Churches

    WordPress is the most popular platform powering websites and church websites. One of the beauties of WordPress is that it can be extended by plugins that add to the functionality. There are literally hundred of thousands of plugins available for free or paid versions.

    Here’s our roundup of some of the most useful WordPress plugins for churches.

    Backup

    UpdraftPlus

    Updraft plus is a database backup plugin that is free (with some paid premium features). I have set it to do an automatically weekly backup to my Dropbox account which was super simple.

    With Updraft plus you can backup to your preferred storage location and restore in just three clicks. Backup to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift or email. The paid version also allows you to backup to Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, pCloud, WebDAV or UpdraftVault, their integrated storage option for UpdraftPlus.

    You can do backups manually or schedule them to automatically run every 2, 4, 8 or 12 hours, daily, weekly, monthly or fortnightly.

    It’s not an exciting plugin, but one that you would be grateful for if things go wrong, or your site gets hacked!

    Download here

    Security and Spam Protection

    Sucuri

    Sucuri is a popular security plugin with 800,000+ installs on website. We use the free version on all of our websites.

    Firstly it will tell you if any core WordPress files have been modified (a.k.a. hacked) and if there are any suspicious files lurking in your install.

    The dashboard allows you to add some hardening settings, including turning off the plugin and themes file editor.

    Sucuri gives you an access log showing what users have done what and emails notifications of changes to your install like plugin and them activations.

    A super helpful free plugin with some premium paid features.

    Analytics and Search Engine Plugins

    If you want your church website to appear in the search engines, it is good practice to install a sitemap plugin which is regularly pinged to the major search engines, so they know that you exist.

    XML Sitemap Generator

    We have found this plugin to be the best sitemap generator, which creates a styled (so pleasing to human eyes too) sitemap and pings the major search engines. You can set which custom post types are added to the sitemap too.

    It has a user-friendly interface, you can easily configure the plugin to suit your needs and generate sitemaps in just a few clicks.

    The best news is, this plugin is free for everyone! Since it’s released under the GPL, you can use it free of charge on your personal or commercial site.

    Download the XML Sitemap Generator free.

    Google SiteKit

    The Google Site Kit banner adds analytics and other features to your website. I must admit most of Google Analytics is beyond us, but it does show how many hits each page has had, how long people have stayed on your pages for and how they got there.

    I find what people searched for to get to the site helpful, although still bemused why “Solving the portable baptism pool issue” is consistently the top page on this site!

    When you install the plugin, the site kit will guide you through the steps to getting analytics and other features up and running and will require you to have a Google account.

    You can download the plugin here

    Specifically Christian Plugins

    Pray for the nations

    Pray for thenations is a free plugin to help your church pray for the nations. It keeps it self up to date with country specific demographics from the CIA World Factbook and links to the Operation World prayer points for each country.

    Here’s an example for Ukraine…

    Ukraine

    Ukraine

    Population:

    Life Expectancy: 70.5 years (2024 est.)

    People groups: Ukrainian 77.8%, Russian 17.3%, Belarusian 0.6%, Moldovan 0.5%, Crimean Tatar 0.5%, Bulgarian 0.4%, Hungarian 0.3%, Romanian 0.3%, Polish 0.3%, Jewish 0.2%, other 1.8% (2001 est.)

    Religions: Orthodox (includes the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC), and the Ukrainian Orthodox – Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP)), Ukrainian Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish (2013 est.)

    Prayer points for Ukraine

    Operation World is the definitive global prayer handbook, which has been used by more than a million Christians to pray for the nations.All the countries of the world featured with maps of each country,geographic information, people groups within each country, economic information, political information, religious make-up of each country, a daily prayer calendar, answers to prayer, and challenges for prayer.
    Whether you are an intercessor praying behind the scenes for world change, a missionary abroad or simply curious about the world, Operation World will give you the information necessary to play a vital role in fulfilling the Great Commission. Buy from Amazon (earns a small commission for plugin author)

    The Pray for the Nations plugin is available here

    Church Admin Plugin

    The Church Admin Plugin is the one stop shop for a church management software solution for your website.

    It all starts with the people module, where you can keep track of everybody involved with your church from first time visitor to members. There are tools to organise and schedule service rotas, the church calendar, sermon audio and video (including getting onto Podcasting sites). There are modules for organising small groups, classes and events including ticketing. Communication tools are included for SMS, email and push notifications.

    The free version includes the people module.

    The basic version adds on the sermon module and calendars.

    The standard version is a game changer, allowing you to Manage your address list, calendar, rotas (schedules), communication tools, sermon podcasting, free events and much more. When you first install the Church Admin Plugin you get a 28 day free trial of the standard version, to try out all the features.

    You can sign up to our weekly email to receive the Free Manual

    The premium version adds on online giving forms for PayPal and Stripe, the app, pastoral visitation module and a child protection incident reporting module.

    Why not get the upgrade to the premium version now with 25% coupon code CRM25

  • Best CRM for churches

    Best CRM for churches

    CRM software allows companies to manage relationships with customers. Many church members will use them in their everyday work. Churches don’t have customers! But they do need to manage relationship with their congregations and visitors. Thankfully there are church specific CRM tools out there, generally called Church Management Software comes in – a CRM specially designed for churches!

    Managing a church requires you to be able to track attendance and giving, schedules services and classes, organise volunteers, communicate with members and organise special events and much more.

    In 2024 you’ll want a Church management software (ChMS) that is cloud based, so staff and volunteers can access and use it and preferably with desktop and app versions.

    Here are our top 3

    Planning Center

    Planning center starts with a database of people and then you can add on the options you require, making it scalable as the church grows.

    The software includes modules for managing:

    • People
    • Events
    • Services
    • Giving – you are charged for monthly donations, starting at $14pm for 75 donations (Credit card fees are on top)
    • Price range $0 – $1293 per month

    Breeze

    Has modules for people, groups, check in, giving, messaging and service planning.

    It integrates with MailChimp for sending email and QuickBooks for finances.

    The Web based software

    • Manage their databases
    • Create groups
    • Send and schedule email and SMS text messaging
    • Offer online and text message giving
    • Generate contribution reports
    • Set up event registration and manage volunteers
    • Securely check-in children and print name tags

    Price $72 per month whatever your church size.

    Church Admin Plugin

    Church Admin is a comprehenseive Church Management System for churches of all sizes. It bolts on as a plugin to a Church’s WordPress powered website. WordPress is the most popular website system.

    Church Admin starts with people – the address list of everyone connected to your church whatever their membership level from first time visitor to member. You will be able to track their integration and send email or SMS to any group, team or individual in the list.

    Price range $0 to £99 per year.

    The free version allows you and your users to manage your address list, calendar and sermon podcasting.

    The premium version allows your users to manage your address list, calendar, rotas (schedules), communication tools, sermon podcasting, , plus the Our Church app, child protection, online PayPal and Stripe giving forms and more. A premium subscription is $99 per year. Small churches under 50 people can purchase a lifetime licence for $30.

    The Church Admin plugin is ideal if your church website uses WordPress and all the data is stored securely in your website database.

    The only thing missing compared to the other solutions is service planning and that is in the pipeline for 2025.

    Get the free manual now with this form…

    Or even better subscribe to the premium version paying monthly, quarterly, annually or a lifetime licence…

    Choose upgrade subscription

  • A change to the pricing of the Plugin

    Church Admin Plugin is around 12 years old now and its time to give it a more sustainable future with a change of pricing.

    Current premium licence holders won’t be affected by the change.

    But from now on, everyone who already has the free plugin or install it will get a 28 day trial of the Standard version. You can stay on the Standard version for USD $40p.a. or downgrade to the free version, which now only offers the People module so you can organise your church directory.

    The premium version adds the Our Church app, the Pastoral visitation module, PayPal and Stripe giving for USD $129 p.a.

    This change will make developing maintaining and supporting users more sustainable for the long term!

    Free Version

    The free version includes the People module.

    On first installation, you will have a 28 day trial of the Standard version with no card details required.

    Including the People module

    And these modules…

    • Age Related Groups
    • Attendance
    • Calendar
    • Classes
    • Communication tools
    • Contact form
    • Events – free ticketing only
    • Facilities
    • Follow up funnels
    • Inventory
    • Key dates module
    • Media
    • Ministries
    • Units
    • Spiritual Gifts
    • Small groups
    • Sites and Services
    • Schedule (Rotas)
    • Sessions

    Upgrade now or from your Church Admin main page…

    Premium Version

    The Premium version includes all the standard features and

    App with full administrator features – The Our Church app, puts church life on people’s devices. The Our Church app is a simple to configure app available free in the iOS, Google Play and Amazon app stores.

    Pastoral Visitation module – track and log pastoral visits.

    Schedule availability – users can set their availability,

    Online Giving PayPal/Stripe forms,

    Event ticketing with paid tickets.

    Gift Aid reports for UK Churches

    Upgrade now or from your Church Admin main page…

  • Android App Woes

    Android App Woes

    Some Android users off the app have been reporting the app getting stuck on a blank page with Home at the top. And others get an “Oops – perhaps Church Admin needs updating or the website is down” message

    If it’s the blank page issue…

    Somehow the cached data has got corrupted. Clearing app data for Our Church will fix.

    Step 1: Open the Settings application on your device.

    Step 2: Head over to Apps Menu.

    Step 3: Choose Installed Applications.

    Step 4: Find the Application you want to Clear the App Data of.

    Step 5: Select it, Move to the Storage Tab.

    Step 6: Hit Clear Storage/Clear App Data.

    If it’s the other error…

    This seems to have only affected some devices, especially on completely closing the app or restarting the device. It’s a bug where the device registers to receive push notifications before the app is able to connect to the internet. That’s fixed for v28.6 which should be online overnight.

  • Stopping spam

    Stopping spam

    Recently I have had a rash of registrations that are obviously not real people – spam registrations. I am utterly sick of spam! So I decided to do something about it.

    Akismet doesn’t stop spam registrations, only spam comments and it’s quite expensive. I’d swapped to AntiSpamBee for their free comment spam plugin which was brilliant, but again that wasn’t stopping registrations by spammers.

    I spent some time researching and came across CleanTalk – which protects registration forms, contact forms, comment forms and seems to do so brilliantly!

    There’s a 7 day free trial and then it is only $8 pa for the basic package. I have had no more Russians with lots of random letters and numbers registering on the site. It also allowed me to check current users against known spam IPs an email addresses – so another 49 users were culled.

    The site dashboard shows you how well it is working. This is my first 24 hours…

    You can also check exactly what has been blocked and denied and correct any false positives (none so far!)

    I am very happy to recommend the service – the image below is an affiliate link

  • Styling the prayer request form

    Styling the prayer request form

    Today someone sent me a screenshot of the prayer request form from their website – it looked awful!

    It’s a nice clean theme, but this page looks awful.

    What can you do? Depends on how confident you are with html!

    If you right click and then inspect on the page, you will be able to see the HTML and CSS.

    This theme has placed it correctly just above the first article. And above the little bit of Prayer request form code is a tag called “Main”. Notice that there is the word flex in a bubble next to it. That told me that it is a flexible layout!

    So now we need to make the prayer request section fill the width and the other content needs to go underneath.

    One of the nice features of WordPress is the Customizer, which allows you to make tweaks live.

    Login to your dashboard and click on Customize. Then click on Additional CSS.

    What we need to do in this case is make all the articles work on flex-wrap basis and then the form can be set to 100%.

    So the code to add is

    #main{flex-wrap:wrap;}
    .church-admin-prayer-request{flex: 0 0 100%; }
    
    .post-excerpt{padding:20px;}

    The command flex:0 0 100% – tells it not to shrink or grow but be 100% width!

    I added in some padding to each article to so they weren’t as bunched.

    Finally hit publish to save the change. Phew.

    If that’s daunting. Get in touch – I normally charge £30ph ($40ph) and for that one it took long to write this post about it!

  • Learnt something new today 3.0.0

    When is 2.7763890 greater than 2.778000?

    When the numbers are computer program versions! And that is why some of you haven’t been able to update Church Admin plugin for a while!

    Today I learned that computer program numbers are three numbers separated by 2 dots…

    The first number is the major version, the second number is minor version and the third number is an update.

    They are not decimal numbers so 2.7763890 is greater than 2.778000 because even though they are both major version 2. The second part of the version number – 7763890 is bigger than 778000.

    There you go.

    Church Admin is now at 3.0.0 not because it is a major version upgrade, but because my old numbering was messy and changing the major version is a quick fix. The new logo many of you will now see for the first time is the upgrade 😉

  • 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!

  • Roles and permissions

    I’ve improved permissions and roles

    When you first install the Church Admin plugin, the default is that only users with “administrator” role can access the backend admin area.

    Any users created by registering/editing the address list are given a very basic “subscriber” role – they cannot create posts or pages etc.

    There are two ways of allowing access to parts of the Church Admin backend,other than administrators.

    Roles

    If you go to Church Admin>Settings> Roles you can set different modules of the plugin to be accessed by different roles (like subscriber, author, contributor, editor, administrator). By default the plugin has these set to administrator (in practice anyone who is allowed to manage_options)
    This is easiest and safest!

    Permissions

    If you want to grant access to certain parts of the plugin, but not allow people to be able to post, then name based permission is the way to go.
    Firstly the people need to have their directory entry tied to their user account.
    The head to Church Admin>Settings>Permissions

    Type in people’s names for the different items and click save at the bottom.
    NOTE: Administrators can always access everything.

    If it all goes wrong, then you can check “Delete all user permissions” and click save, to reset back to roles based access.

  • Email only is not the best way to communicate

    So this evening I got in touch with a web client who had not paid an invoice I’d sent him by email in January. I used WhatsApp to ask if he was not an email guy? The image above was his reply. I’m pretty sure that is the Guiness World Record for the most unread emails! Needless to say I sent the invoice by WhatsApp and it will be paid tomorrow 😉

    So I asked around and here are two more screenshots friends sent me…

    So your church emails are probably stuck in people’s unread email inboxes.

    For the important stuff we use Bulk SMS and push messaging via the app you can get for Church Admin Plugin.

    If you want to know more…

  • Maps, Directions and App registration

    Maps, Directions and App registration

    Today’s church admin plugin update makes a usability tweak to the “church_admin_register” shortcode and block. The first step of entering the email address and clicking next step will check if it’s a returning user or registration and offer the next step. A confirmation email will be sent on saving and a subscriber user account is created on email confirmation – this allows the user to edit themselves.

    Under the hood registration is also enabled on the app – when an a non-logged in app user goes to Account they will be able to register basic details. They will get a confirmation email which will then lead to a user account.

    The admin email account is warned of registrations and edits!

  • I have added targeted push notifications to the app

    You can now target push notifications using the normal filter – they will go to logged in app users who match the filter conditions. 
    The Black Friday offer of a lifetime one-off payment of $99 for your church to subscribe has ended but I have forgotten to up the price if you start from Church Admin>App on your website! I’ll get round to it next update 😉 The app is free for your congregation to install.

    Bulk SMS

    Some people turn off push notifications too, so when a message is really important and urgent, then the send SMS feature is the way to go! It’s just more expensive.
    I have  added Twilio as an SMS provider – they have a referral offer of $10 credit when you add $10 credit starting from this link, which is also on the SMS settings page. Messages are pretty cheap, but you do have to buy a mobile number from them at $1 (£0.74) per month. I’m working on handling replies – that’s coming soon. The other providers in the plugin still want, but someone requested Twilio and helped with some code!

    Sermon Podcast page

    I’ve fixed some dropdown menu issues some were having in the latest update 2.7016.

  • 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!

  • That Sunday

    That Sunday

    I’ll never forget that Sunday. It was a year or two into leading my first church plant. I was in a lot of pain from a slipped disc still and no-one turned up to set out the chairs, or do the P.A. I’d forgotten my mobile (it was in the days when they only made calls and texts!) and so I begun to struggle putting out chairs and setup the sound gear ready to lead worship.

    The small group leader on duty hadn’t checked our rota (schedule) or their email and so hadn’t arranged for people to help. The PA guy had gone on holiday and forgotten to tell anyone.

    As I was struggling with some chairs some first time visitors showed up early (because that’s what visitors do!) I was mortified, but very grateful for the help, thinking they will never come back. Thankfully, just the opposite happened. They were thinking this guy needs the help and they wanted to serve. Within weeks, she ended up running a kids and he led the PA team and played ina worship band. God is good!

    That Sunday wouldn’t happen now. Volunteers get an email reminder, or SMS if they prefer and they can look at the app to see when they are doing what.

    I’d love you to have a that sunday where quality visitors turn up who can help you get on with the mission. But not That Sunday! You can avoid it with Church Admin plugin organisation and communication tools and by getting the app in your church.

    I’m currently offering a lifetime church subscription for a one-off payment of US$99 – other currencies are available. Current monthly/annual subscribers can get in on the offer too!

    Sale Price: USD $99 – you can change the currency below.