Church Info

It is with great sadness that I document someone has been vandalizing our demo installation. If you have any difficulty with the demo installation let me know promptly and I will reset it to the the default beginning point.
This is sad because it's been fun to see all the crazy experimental data that people enter while they are testing. You can send me email using the email address "info" at churchdb.org. On another pathetic note, I need to obscure the email address to help keep other demons at bay.

ChurchInfo is a free church database program to help churches track members, families, groups, pledges and payments. Our feature set is comparable to pricey church management application packages. Our users are supported by an open-source community of people who volunteer their time and energy to make this technology obtainable to all churches.



Wiki documentation is now obtainable. help us maintain this documentation! All you need to do is register with a valid email address.

They have a demo installation of the latest version 1.2.11 obtainable here
Feel free to play with this database to see if ChurchInfo will work for your church. The passwords for this demo database are: “demoadmin” for Admin, “seemoney” for JohnFinancial, and “nomoney” for SuzieNotFinancial. This new version connects to the Google geocoder, which has better international support than the previous geocoder. There's plenty of bug fixes and minor enhancements. See the links below if you find a bug or need to discuss an issue.

Bare-metal to ChurchInfo! This document covers every step from building a Linux server on an inexpensive PC to installing ChurchInfo. How To Set Up ChurchInfo on Ubuntu LAMP Server.pdf

A demo installation of version 1.2.8 is obtainable here: This database has been walking for a long time and has plenty of data entered by experimenters.


The demo sites includes a simple connection to schedule group meetings in WebCalendar, obtainable here: http://www.churchdb.org/WebCalendar-1.2.b1.


Naturally Networked

ChurchInfo runs on any server that supports PHP and mySQL. The server may be in-house or at an ISP anywhere on the Web. Any number of people may access the database simultaneously.


Relatives

A relatives is a group of people who are treated as a unit. The obvious example would be a married couple and perhaps their children. The relatives members do not need to have the same last name, but they should live at the same address to get newsletters and financial statements. Pledges and payments are tracked by relatives. Some churches call a Relatives a “Pledging Unit”.

A person is an individual associated with the church. A Person can be a member of a Relatives, as well as a person can also be a member of one or more Groups. A Person has individual contact information, such as a cell phone number and an email address. A Person also has a relationship with the church as “Member”, or “Guest”.


Person

A group is a collection of people, such as the choir or the stewardship committee. Groups have plenty of uses. Here are a few ideas: committees, church school classes, covenant groups, child sitters. The possibilities are countless. ChurchInfo makes it easy to contact all the members of a group by letter or email.


Group


Pledges and Payments

Pledges and Payments are tracked for each fiscal year, with automated support for reminder letters. There is also automated support for generating donation acknowledgement letters for tax purposes based on the calendar year. The entry of payments is highly automated, with support for check and credit card scanners, automated deposit slip printing and electronic submission of credit card and EFT payments.
Volunteer Tracking

Access to financial data may be restricted to one or a few individual users as appropriate. Most users need access to the Person, Group and Relatives information to look up phone numbers, generate address labels and send email.

ChurchInfo allows you to generate “Volunteer Opportunities” like baking, lawn-mowing, babysitting, letter-stuffing, etc. These opportunities may be assigned to people, making it easy to locate them when the need arises.
Permissions


Mapping

The latitude/longitude coordinates of each Relatives may be used to plot the congregation on a map, or to find the nearest neighbors in the congregation for a particular relatives.


Canvass Automation

ChurchInfo provides support for conducting an every-member canvass, and capturing the results in the database. The canvassers get briefing sheets with information about each relatives to be contacted. During or after the contact the canvasser enters comments in the database.


Sunday School Support

Classes may be defined as Groups with roles “Teacher”, “Student”, “Liaison”, and then special Sunday School reports may be used to generate class lists and attendance sheets.


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