Software Transition Team Final Report

Feb 24, 2022

The software transition project, initiated in May 2021, has met its goal to implement a software solution to better support membership, bookkeeping, and stewardship functions, and the team is now disbanding. This report identifies the team’s accomplishments and recommendations for the work that remains.

Accomplishments:

• Selected Breeze Church Management Software to replace Fellowship One church  member database and additionally to manage giving records.
• Migrated people data from Fellowship One to Breeze. Community Connections is now entering newcomer data directly in Breeze and implementing processes to assure data are accurate.
• Configured Breeze Follow Ups to facilitate newcomer follow-ups by church ministry and program leads.
• Migrated 2021 pledge data to Breeze. Breeze is now the system of record for member pledges.  Stewardship has now entered the 2022 pledges.
• Moved recurring auto payments from Vanco to Stripe, Breeze’s payment processing partner.
• Migrated 2021 contributions data to Breeze. 2022 contributions are now being entered in Breeze, eliminating the multiple steps in the bookkeeping process.
• Created accounts and trained users in Community Connections, Finance Team, Stewardship Team, and Children & Family Ministries.
• Created a COVID proof of vaccination precheck form on Breeze.
• Began ongoing effort to develop, maintain, and document workflows and procedures to capitalize on Breeze features.

Out of scope of this project:

• Congregant access to maintain own records and view member directory.
• Migrate bulk-email mailing lists, to be maintained in one place and automatically synchronized with other bulk-email tools (e.g., Mailchimp).
• Develop capability to send other bulk mailings.
• Incorporate church events into Breeze calendar, for automatic synchronization with church website calendar.
• Automatic event sign-ups.
• Tracking historical group participation.
• Tracking skills and interest.
• Group email distribution lists.
• General ledger, payroll, and human resource management.

Recommendations:

Benefits of the Breeze implementation will be realized only with diligent maintenance and management of the tool, including critical tasks of data cleanup, procedure development and documentation, user training and support, integration of processes across functions. The structure that would enable this includes:

• A Breeze oversight team to take responsibility for the above, to consult on potential new Breeze application projects (e.g., retreat registration and payment processing), and to hold responsibility for convening regular meetings with Breeze users to discuss how they are using the database and, if a group wanted to make a change, how it affects others, etc. The Breeze advisory team would be a technology subteam (see below) and would initially be populated provisionally by the congregational administrator and software transition team alumni.
• A technology team with clearly delegated authority and accountability for administering not only Breeze but also other information systems and technology tools in use at church. Responsibilities would include: prioritizing and recommending technology adoption and maintenance projects to the operations team; managing approved projects; and assuring system users are trained and maintain current procedures.

We have many people to thank. First, our thanks go to the church groups and stakeholders who gave input to design the data structures, welcomed training to use the new tools, and are starting to use the system. We also thank the congregation for their support in the transition from Vanco to Stripe. And last but not least, we thank the Operations Team for entrusting us with this important work on behalf of the congregation.

Software Transition Team members:

• Jane Voytek, project manager
• Bill Blakely
• Clark Sanford
• Noemi de Guzman

Please contact us at softwareteam@uuoakland.org if you have questions.