Set a timeline that works for your church
Planning a major software migration, such as a Church Management Software move is a major undertaking that affects almost all of your church staff, lay leaders, volunteers, members and guests. It's no small undertaking.
Many churches struggle to adequately plan for the move, incurring unexpected costs and delays. This article will help you take all of the timing and cost issues into consideration.
Time Considerations
Before you begin, it's helpful to understand major timeline issues that you need to address:
- The decision to solve the problem... years? But once you decide to do something. 2-4 weeks.
- In many cases this decision process can drag - depending on how much pain your staff feels and whether it's really a priority. There are team politics and people in the mix... We've seen churches suffer for years before finally deciding to do something!
- You may need to assess your current state to decide whether the actual problem is actually "the software" or if you need to focus your attention on configuration, training, or a combination of all three of these main reasons that churches realize that their ChMS is not effective for them. Depending on whether you choose to engage a consultant, such as Strategic Matter, or perform this step alone, your timing may be fast or slow. In either case, it's important to get feedback from various users and understand the underlying cause of your ChMS woes. This can take 2-4 weeks, but can be sped up by focusing your discovery process on a 1-2 days of concerted discovery workshops with facilitated questions to help understand your ministry processes, and how the ChMS does or does not support your processes.
- Requirements Gathering and Evaluation - 6-8 weeks
- If you decide that new software is the best option, it's critical to define your church's requirements. Like any good "job description" your ChMS needs a job description. What is it that you (and your team) expect the ChMS to do to help you move forward in your Vision and Mission. This step demands a deep understanding of what your processes to disciple, shepherd and care for your members is - and how you plan to execute it. If the software were a person, what would they do, and how would they do it... This is the foundation of your requirements document and how you can make sure that you evaluate your software according to your needs instead of letting the software or other churches define your needs for you.
- We schedule 1-2 days of workshops to define the requirements. It usually takes 2 weeks to convert the discussion of those workshops into a detailed list of requirements and a narrative "request for proposal" that can be shared with software vendors to help them demonstrate how their software can support your Mission.
- After giving the software vendors enough time to respond in writing and allowing enough time for scheduling presentations (your team's schedule and the vendor's schedules), you can expect to schedule vendor presentation schedules about 6-8 weeks after your "requirements gathering" workshops.
- After proposal presentations, you should expect 2-4 weeks to deliberate on final choices. This can vary widely - I've seen churches leave their presentations with a clear front runner, a few things to confirm that decision and a final decision by the end of the week and others deliberate for months. This has lots to do with culture and what else is going on.
- A good rule of thumb is that it should take 8-12 weeks from the time you decide to do something about the Church Management Software problem to the time you choose which software to select.
- Implementation
- Once you choose a winning candidate, you can expect 8-12 weeks to implement
- It may take some time to get on an implementation schedule and set a "kickoff day" for your project.
- A good weekly project schedule, including design, configuration, migration/conversion, and training, should take about 8-10 weeks. This can vary based on staff schedules, other events at your church, holidays, etc.
- You'll want to plan for some transition time after "go-live" for your staff to get acclimated, and to get your members and help your members and guests get onboarded into the "member portal" or app functions of the software. Go-live is the day that your final migration/import occurs and the new software is the "system of record."
- I don't recommend a "parallel" migration. In my opinion the best migrations happen as a cutover. Unless your church is massive and has the budget to build integrations between old an new software, two systems of record is something to avoid.
- That said - you will have to deal with some period of some systems that can't be cutover on a single day:
- Giving - Your donors will have to re-enroll scheduled recurring gifts from one system to another. Because you can force them all to do that on the cutover day, and you can't migrate payment information, and you don't want to turn off the old giving and stop getting paid, you will need to communicate and help your donors re-enroll. This will take time and relationship. You'll need a plan to keep the old and new payment systems up simultaneously during your transition.
- Event registrations already started - Almost every church has something that people can be registering for at any given time of the year. For events already in the registration period, I recommend finishing the registrations in whatever system you started them in. You will have some manually updating to do in the new system, but that's better than confusing your registrants.
- How long should you keep your old software subscription active?
- It can be helpful to keep access to your old system for 3-6 months. Like a safety blanket, it makes people feel comfortable to know that they can be able to go back and get data from the old system for some period of time. Some information can't be exported and imported in batches, so you may have some manual updates to deal with. And in every migration, there's a likelihood of something getting missed.
Financial Cost Considerations
As you make the migration, there are several cost considerations specifically related to the timeline that you should consider.
- Contract cycles
- If you are in an contract with your current provider, you should look to start your selection process 9-12 months before your current contract ends. You'll need about 6 months to gather requirements, select a provider, migrate, and implement. If you need 3-6 months of overlap, that will be 9-12 months.
- Ask your provider if they will be willing to renew on a month-to-month basis. Kingdom oriented providers are usually willing to work with their church clients to facilitate a graceful transition. This can give you some flexibility if your current agreement ends sooner than you can complete the transition.
- Overlap time
- There will be some period of time before the actual "migration" day that you need to pay your new ChMS for their product while you prepare and onboard. You should expect 3 months of paying both providers before "go-live."
- There will be some period of time after the "go-live" that you want to keep the old system in read only mode. This could be 3-6 months, or more, depending on your preferences and contract dates.
- Staff time
- Your staff will be involved in planning, training, configuring, and other activity to make the move. What's their time worth?
- Professional Services
- If you decide to engage with coaches and consultants to move, you should consider their fees and ongoing retainers. Their cost can dramatically reduce your timeframes, help ensure the success of your project and reduce staff time figuring out the project executing without help.
In a future post, we will provide a cost calculator for moving to new software to help you consider the cost of people time, overlaps, and consulting.
What questions do you have about moving to new ChMS?
Reach out for help. We'd love to help you navigate your journey to a happy ChMS experience.