What web app would improve your ministry?

July 27, 2009 in for Churches, Outreach, Pastors

I met a web developer who has recently quit his job and would like to create web applications that would be useful for ministry. Have you got any suggestions for websites/applications that would really help you in your ministry?

I can see a real need for a web application to help with rostering – all churches need rosters, organising and managing rosters is a messy and time-consuming task, and I’m yet to find a good web application to assist with this.

Can you see any other gaps in the market?

  • http://www.adrianjackson.tv Adrian Jackson

    Hi,

    I totally agree with the need for rostering. My favourite is http://onlinerostering.com It is fantastic and loaded with features. I was introduced to it at Hillsong Church, but for smaller churches with smaller teams it is a bit expensive for the job. Would love something along a similar vein that doesn’t cost as much.

    Also need a great database solution (I know you’ve been exploring this one recently, my church is doing the same thing… maybe we can partner up, we aren’t that far away?).

    Lastly, a groupware system for sharing tasks amongst leadership etc, developing documentation and so on. We are currently investigating Google Apps.

    Adrian

  • Steven Kryger

    Some suggestions I’ve received via Facebook:

    “what about an ejector seat attached to your USB port that physically propelled you away from your computer and into a face-to-face chat? ;-) ”

    “Have you seen 280slides? great powerpoint like web app.

    I think a good calendar system that could push items directly to peoples calendars who subscribe. That way if you subscribe to the church calendar it would update my iCal or Outlook calendar automatically.”

  • Johnson

    A Rostering software is definitely a must. It would be nice to link it with Google calendar too so that people can import their roster to their calendar. Having a feature to send SMS as reminder would be nice too. If it can be linked to Google calendar, we can use its SMS feature for free. The roster should also be able to be imported to the church weekly bulletin.

    A database for door-knocking would be handy too. Even better if it can be linked to Google map so that we can visually observe which streets have been covered.

    Like Adrian, I am also investigating the use of Google apps for managing administration documents and calendars. The biggest challenge is convincing the admin staffs to adopt them as they are not “geeky” enough.

  • Steven Kryger

    Has anyone used Smart Roster (http://www.smartroster.net/)?

  • http://sites.google.com/site/ministrywebprojects/ AJ

    If he knows how to program, particularly Ruby on Rails, then there’s a group of us who are trying to connect with other Christian programmers to develop some open-source tools to support mission activity.

  • http://tony.ohagan.name Tony OHagan

    In response to this comment …

    “I think a good calendar system that could push items directly to peoples calendars who subscribe. That way if you subscribe to the church calendar it would update my iCal or Outlook calendar automatically.”

    Google Calendar can do just that and even send you an reminder SMS!

    You can put a readonly Google calendar on your church web site. Members can subscribe to events on this via an iCal, RSS or XML link. They can also add the church calendar to their own list of Google calendars that are color coded and merged together. Add extra public calendars to your calendar (like public holidays or the weather). You can also download a plugin to synchronize the Google calendar into your desktop MS-Office Outlook calendar.

    And its all for free :) .

  • Tom Barrett

    Steve

    I’d dearly love another developer’s contributions to Jethro (jethro-pmm.sourceforge.net), which has an alpha-version rostering add-on called Levi (I use it every day), and could perhaps use a USB ejector-seat module too.

    Sometimes there are things that deserve brand new apps to be built from scratch, and sometimes old projects have got crusty and are worth a re-start, but I fear that too often developers spread themselves too widely and we get 3 half-baked solutions instead of 1 great one.

  • Steven Kryger

    Hi Tom, what technical expertise would be useful for the Jethro/Levi projects?

  • Tom Barrett

    Jethro is object-oriented PHP in the centre, with MySQL underneath and HTML/CSS/JS/jQuery on top. So ideally someone with skills in each of those layers, although there are probably things that a purely front-end developer could do.

  • Brook

    hi Tom

    Wondering if your Levi system is available for others to use? I dont mind helping out develop it too – although my skills are more in html / css and design…

  • http://cciw.org.au Tom Barrett

    Hi Brook

    Yes, Levi is available on sourceforge via CVS (admittedly, sourceforge CVS is a bit hard to use). I haven’t packaged it as a download yet. How about next week I add Levi to the Jethro demo system, you have a look and see what you could contribute. The design and layout currently are nothing fancy so there could be look-and-feel improvements you think of.

    Cheers
    Tom