Do I really need 14 apps to join the team?

One day when guiding a new volunteer through onboarding, I realized I was about to tell this person they need 14 apps/accounts to be a key leader on the team.

• A volunteer email address for communicating with congregants
• The Microsoft Teams app for team communications
• Thinkific to go through team training
• A separate training platform for a course from our church's compliance team
• Planning Center Services for rosters and service plans
• Church Center for small groups
• Planning Center Groups for managing the small group
• A YouTube account for being on the online chat team
• Facebook for larger global community groups
• Zoom for online events
• Formstack for submitting and reviewing reports
• Slack for communicating with the Digital team who preferred it over MS Teams (can't blame them)
• Front for pastoral care communications
• ClickUp for project management

Now, some of this reflects the fact that we were a digital ministry and part of a much larger system. And some of it could’ve been trimmed down.

But while this may be an extreme example, it’s not uncommon to have to ask volunteers to set up a digital workshop before they interact with people. Kids volunteers need Services, Check-ins, Church Center, training, and a background check. Production team members need Services, ProPresenter, training, and a group chatting platform.

I don’t think there’s a way to eliminate the needs that these many apps are fulfilling, but I do think we can mitigate it.

The core part of all of these tools are communication, project management, and knowledge management. (That or it’s built into Planning Center which is at least under one login.)

What we need is a platform like Notion for churches. An all-in-one platform that let’s the team work together, go through content, manage information, track projects, and manage communication.

We need a one-login experience for anyone in our church to be involved.

We need it to link with all the data we already have. That means it needs to be built into Planning Center or built around it with their API. The question is, who will build it?