(Click on any of these images to see a larger picture.) Yesterday morning six of us grabbed a table at Panera Bread and worked to set up our new CCB software. It was quite a sight, six people with six laptops all logged into our database wirelessly at Panera Bread. So I took some pictures.
The people I invited were strategically chosen. Jeanette Chase, the woman wearing blue in the foreground of the first picture, is our Family Ministry Director. So much of what we had to decide yesterday dealt with the issue of children in our database. At what age does their profile even show up? And who has access to see their profiles? We spent a great deal of time addressing the difference between the people we wanted to work with the children's database (a fewer number) and those who are child worker approved (those who've gone through all the background checks). It appears that CCB is set up so that anyone who is child worker approved has access to the children's database. We need to check into this further.
Sitting next to me was Deering Dyer (the man leaning to his right in the second picture), our Small Groups pastor, and next to him was Ron Biddle, our Director of Membership. Having both Deering and Ron present at this meeting was critical because CCB will be so critical to their future ministries. What kind of groups do we want to designate withing CCB? How much of a person's profile will be available to other members?
The whole intent of CCB is to increase the community connection of
one member to another. Think of CCB as an online Member's Picture
Directory - a directory which never goes out of date. However, we need
to be sensitive to member's privacy desires. So we set up everything
so that any member could set their entire profile to "unlisted," and we
set up CCB so that only members of the church could get on to see the
listed profiles of any other member. But then the question arises
about people who are a member of a small group, but not a member of the
church. We want to develop community within the individual small
groups. So we made the listed profiles of other group members
available to one another regardless of church membership. LImited
access users (non-church members) will be able to see the listed
profiles of other people within their small groups, but not the
profiles of other church members.
Sitting across from me were Jonathan Pierce, our I.T. genius, and Lori Biddle, our Director of Magnification (see third and fourth pictures above).
As I've mentioned in other articles, I don't see how we could have
accomplished this without Jonathan and the expertise of a
technology-savvy person. To get some idea of the issues he has dealt
with in the CCB conversion - along with a GREAT testimony of the tech
assistance we've received from the good folks at CCB - check out Jon's last three posts on CrewNeckTech.com. Jonathan demonstrated great leadership yesterday as he walked us through the 25 page setup document.
You may be wondering what all this work is about. If CCB is so good, why did we need to invest 3 1/2 hours of our time? (Think about it... from the Executive Pastor's viewpoint, yesterday's meeting is equal to 21 man hours dedicated entirely to CCB setup!) Look at it this way. Out of the box CCB is set up for a generic church. They have taken into account most of the things that a typical church might encounter. However, no church is "typical." In fact, as Will Mancini has recently written, every church is unique. So the work we did yesterday was to take the "generic" out and put the "Crossroads" into CCB.
Lori Biddle was invited, first, because she makes any meeting more fun than it otherwise would be. She also oversees an unbelievable number of teams in the Magnification Department. She knows the personality of Crossroads perhaps better than any other person at the church. Having her input was critical in converting CCB into Crossroads' database. But as you can tell from the last picture, she (and the rest of us) were mind numb by the end of the session.
There was one other overriding reason why I wanted all these people present at yesterday's meeting. These are all leaders within our church. I know if they buy into something, they will use their influence with the rest of our staff and volunteers. By including all of them through all the decision making process, I hope that they will all have the same sense of ownership and excitement about what CCB can do for our congregation as I have. The software and the technology all comes to naught without enthusiastic leadership. I'm counting on all of them for enthusiasm and for leadership.
To read the whole progression of our CCB implementation at Crossroads, click here.
