Welcome to Churchdb.org!
ChurchInfo is a free church database program to help churches track members, families, groups, pledges and payments. Our feature set is comparable to expensive church management software packages. Our users are supported by an open-source community of people who volunteer their time and energy to make this technology available to all churches.
It is with great sadness that I report someone has been vandalizing our demo installation. If you have any difficulty with the demo installation please let me know promptly and I will reset it to the the default starting point. This is really sad because it has been fun to see all the crazy experimental data that people enter while they are testing. You can send me email using the email address "info" at churchdb.org. On another pathetic note, I need to obscure the email address to help keep other demons at bay.
Wiki documentation is now available. Please help us maintain this documentation! All you need to do is register with a valid email address.
Bare-metal to ChurchInfo! This document covers every step from building a Linux server on an inexpensive PC to installing ChurchInfo. How To Set Up ChurchInfo on Ubuntu LAMP Server.pdf
We have a demo installation of the latest version 1.2.10 available here
Feel free to play with this database to see if ChurchInfo will
work for your church. The
passwords for this demo database are: “demoadmin” for
Admin, “seemoney” for JohnFinancial, and “nomoney” for
SuzieNotFinancial. This new version connects to the Google
geocoder, which has better international support than the
previous geocoder. There are many bug fixes and minor
enhancements. See the links below if you find a bug or want to
discuss an issue.
A demo installation of version 1.2.8 is available here: This database has been running for a long time and has lots of data entered by experimenters.
The demo sites includes a simple
connection to schedule group meetings in WebCalendar, available here: https://churchdb.ipower.com/WebCalendarDemo.
Naturally Networked
ChurchInfo runs on any server
that supports PHP and mySQL. The server may be in-house or at an ISP anywhere
on the Internet. Any number of people may access the database simultaneously.
Family
A family is a group of people
who are treated as a unit. The obvious example would be a married couple and
perhaps their children. The family members do not need to have the same last
name, but they should live at the same address to receive newsletters and
financial statements. Pledges and payments are tracked by family. Some churches
call a Family a “Pledging Unit”.
Person
A person is an individual
associated with the church. A Person can be a member of a Family, and a person
can also be a member of one or more Groups. A Person has individual contact
information, such as a cell phone number and an email address. A Person also
has a relationship with the church as “Member”, or “Guest”.
Group
A group is a collection of
people, such as the choir or the stewardship committee. Groups have many uses.
Here are a few ideas: committees, church school classes, covenant groups, baby
sitters. The possibilities are endless. ChurchInfo makes it easy to contact all
the members of a group by letter or email.
Pledges and Payments
Pledges and Payments are tracked
for each fiscal year, with automated support for reminder letters. There is
also automated support for generating donation acknowledgement letters for tax
purposes based on the calendar year. The entry of payments is highly automated,
with support for check and credit card scanners, automated deposit slip
printing and electronic submission of credit card and EFT payments.
Volunteer Tracking
ChurchInfo allows you to create
“Volunteer Opportunities” like baking, lawn-mowing, babysitting,
letter-stuffing, etc. These opportunities may be assigned to people, making it
easy to locate them when the need arises.
Permissions
Access to financial data may be restricted to one or just a few individual users as appropriate. Most users just need access to the Person, Group and Family information to look up phone numbers, generate address labels and send email.
Mapping
The latitude/longitude coordinates of each Family may be used to plot the congregation on a map, or to find the nearest neighbors in the congregation for a particular family.
Canvass Automation
ChurchInfo provides support for conducting an every-member canvass, and capturing the results in the database. The canvassers receive briefing sheets with information about each family to be contacted. During or after the contact the canvasser enters comments in the database.
Sunday School Support
Classes may be defined as Groups with roles “Teacher”, “Student”, “Liaison”, and then special Sunday School reports may be used to generate class lists and attendance sheets.
Bug Reports, Feature Requests, Discussion Groups
Feel free to contact the development team using these
links to this project on the SourceForge server:
Bug
report | Feature
request | Support
request |Discussion
groups