In today’s post we share our conversation with one of the long term infoodle clients, St Peters in the City, a dynamic church in the heart of Tauranga, strongly committed to serving families in the local community and beyond.
Please tell us and everyone else about your church
St Peters in the City is a part of the Presbyterian Churches of Aotearoa New Zealand and are based in Tauranga, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand.
We are a mid-sized organisation who operate integrated services of a church, childcare and Care & Counselling Trust. The Care & Counselling Trust focuses on community betterment offering free counselling, budget management, a social worker who focuses particularly on working with the homeless of our community and with low-socio economic families and individuals, food parcels, self-worth courses and life skill courses.
The church offers regular worship & teaching services, discipleship courses, marriage courses, free community playgroup, youth & children’s programmes on Sunday and during the week and pastoral care.
Before infoodle, what did you use to manage your community?
Prior to infoodle we used a database system from Australia called Pastoral Care. We found that producing a directory was a significant undertaking and caused us to lose many staff hours.
What made you consider infoodle for your administrative needs?
What made us choose infoodle was the ease of printing a directory with photos. Also, we liked the fact that it is a cloud-based system with multi user access. Accessing and editing information, producing reports based on any number of criteria is made simple and quick.
What packages or features of infoodle do you find especially useful?
We use the CRM module as well as the events module. 90% of our communication is through infoodle and we have integrated Mail Chimp for our bulk emails. We use both emails and text messages through infoodle. We use the notes for keeping track of pastoral visits and follow ups needed, appointments, and to do lists to inform specific groups of upcoming needs or visits.
All our venue bookings are handled through the events module with online forms being utilized for event registrations. We use groups to categorise people in the different areas they volunteer and we are just starting to record the volunteer’s hours.
What are the most significant benefits of implementing infoodle?
The benefit of using infoodle is the ease with which keeping our community’s information up-to-date can be accomplished, printing a directory in book form with pictures, creating online forms and then using that information to keep our database updated and generating reports with singular or multiple criteria.
We have been using infoodle for approximately 8 years and we are still learning about new features and find the help tool within the programme incredibly useful and easy to follow. Having different levels of access for different roles means privacy and confidentiality can be maintained.
Any parting words for us?
infoodle continues to grow and modify as they research the needs of users. It is a simple programme to learn to use and it has freed up a lot of staff hours for us.
St Peters in the City, Tauranga
is a church community excited about knowing Jesus and discovering how they can live His way in our world. With a focus on family, they offer a range of services for every age group including worship services, small groups and ministries you can become involved in. Learn more about them on their website.
For more information on infoodle, contact us at sales@infoodle.com
