Does your church use church/pastoral management software? If so, which product?

Craig already knows this, but I can’t resist a plug…

At Ashfield we use a web application I’ve developed called Jethro (jethro-pmm.sourceforge.net), which just today has had its first release on Sourceforge.  It’s released under the GPL and an online demo is available. 

When I was researching this last year there were no existing web-based products that met our needs in terms of price, simplicity and quality.  There are some hosted solutions from the USA that are no doubt good, but they’re also big (feature-wise, compared to our needs) and expensive.

Previous to this we used Pastoral Care 9, installed on a single computer, which had numerous drawbacks.

Interested to hear what else is being used out there.

Tom Barrett - 26 June 2007 05:27 PM

At Ashfield we use a web application I’ve developed called Jethro (jethro-pmm.sourceforge.net), which just today has had its first release on Sourceforge.  It’s released under the GPL and an online demo is available. 
....
Previous to this we used Pastoral Care 9, installed on a single computer, which had numerous drawbacks.

Interested to hear what else is being used out there.

Hi Tom,
I have just added the Bloggs family to your Jethro demo data....8-)
Jethro looks interesting.

It is clearly able to handle one of our needs - efficiently recording people who are in numerous “groups”.

We have laboured with Excel spreadsheets to date but these can obviously become cumbersome with growing congregations and new groups being formed.

Another IT person in our congregation has been investigating database software options for us such as Pastoral Care 9.

I will send him the Jethro demo URL.

Looking forward to the availability of the “Packaged download"…
(we just don’t have time for fiddly set-up....)

Grace & peace,

Terry

Hi Terry

Glad you’ve found Jethro appealing.  The packaged download is actually available as of today - see the download page on the website.

From what I’ve seen, PC9 has a wider range of features but lacks the advantage of being web-based and therefore widely accessible.  It also seems to me that it has a more “opinionated” approach where it gives you fields for set things, rather than generic tools you can use your own way. 

Cheers
Tom

Hi everyone

I work for the Diocesan Secretariat in St Andrew’s House.  I’ve just submitted a post on the “Use Web 2.0 software....” thread about our interest in providing Church Management Software to parishes.  I’m trying to get a working group together to discuss the possibilities.  Please see my post on that thread here

Thanks

Matt