Today, we’re excited to announce the next infographic in our ‘Top 20 Most Popular’ series:
The Top 20 Most Popular Church Management Software Solutions.
Church Management Software help churches handle accounting, donation tracking, service attendance, membership and more. Churches are better able to track resources, manage contacts and foster communication between administrators, staff, ministry leaders, members and visitors.
As we continue to move forward with our top 20 series, it’s important to reflect on the “why” behind the research. If you’re unsure as to why Capterra is releasing a Top 20 list of popular software, refer to CEO Michael Ortner’s blog post on our LMS infographic.
The Research
We began our church management research in a manner similar to our previous infographics. To start our list, we looked at Capterra’s own Church Management Software Directory to find which vendors had received a high number of reviews. From there, we used third-party analytics to measure web traffic for all 150+ vendors listed on Capterra. This process resulted in an initial list of more than 60 church management vendors to examine in more detail.
The research for church management was the first time we had to alter the type of data we were collecting.
Our usual data collection consists of:
1. Total number of customers (or installs)
2. Total number of users
3. Online presence
For church management we switched to:
1. Total number of churches
2. Estimated number of church members managed (based on average church size)
3. Online presence
Note: In terms of member size, many churches were only able to reveal the average size of the churches using their software; to get an accurate assessment of the marketplace, we then multiplied that average size of the churches times the number of churches using their software to get their estimated number of members managed.
For a full breakdown of our step-by-step methodology to determine the Top 20 Ranking, refer to our blog post for the LMS Infographic.
The Data
Below is a table that highlights the data for the Church Management Software Solutions featured in the Top 20:
Social Media
It is interesting to note the variation in social media usage between different software sectors. We found the social media presence to be much smaller with church management than other sectors, particularly when it comes to presence on LinkedIn. There is a presence on Twitter and Facebook, but again, much smaller than other industries.
Each software sector has its own needs based partially on where their audience is congregating (no pun intended) online, and we are always interested in the differences among software sectors. Some industries may maintain relationships via conferences, emails and phone calls because their customers and future customers are not as active online. The question remains, what will social media look like in years to come?
One final note: Some of the vendors provided “lowball” estimates of their users or customers so please take that into consideration. Although we believe this is the best research regarding the church management software industry available online, it remains far from perfect.
If you have any suggestions, question any of the vendors listed, wonder how other vendors didn’t make the cut, or even catch an error, please let us know!