As your church grows, the list of things you need to accomplish each day becomes a bit longer. You’re juggling events, contributions, accounting, volunteers, communications, and so much more. With so many moving parts, it’s easy to become overwhelmed resulting in things falling through the cracks. So how can Realm help you fight for simplicity with so many tasks at hand?
For starters, stop depending on multiple solutions to meet your needs. Realm can simplify your processes by bringing these 6 things together under one roof:
- Online, mobile, and text giving
- Event registrations
- Recruiting, scheduling, and communicating with event volunteers
- Background checks on your staff and volunteers
- Building and updating your church website
- Managing your accounting and financials
1. Realm Online Giving
If your solution for online giving isn’t built into your church management solution, you’re spending time exporting and importing contributions. Not only does this take up time at the start of each week, but it also leaves the door open for errors between your data.
Realm Online Giving is directly inside of Realm’s church management solution, making the automatic posting of contributions possible. Those giving to your church online, through the Realm Connect mobile app, or through text can count on their contributions going directly into your church software. They can view it on their own profiles without waiting around for a statement from your church.
You can create custom online giving and online pledge forms that you can then embed or link to on your website. And custom text keywords can be chosen for each giving form. Plus, you choose the funds available on each form and donations will go directly to the funds chosen by the giver.
2. Event Registrations
With Realm Online Giving already set up, you can enable event registration payments. This means no counting cash or collecting checks at the door of an event. Instead, your members and event attendees can simply pay online ahead of time and you have a better idea of who to expect.
Realm Event Registration gives you the option to add as many registration types as needed. With cost options for each (ie. Adult Dinner for $10 and Child Dinner for $5). You can add custom questions for registrants to answer during the registration process. Like their t-shirt size or food allergies. Connect those questions to a profile field to save their responses on their profile for the future.
3. Volunteer Management
We know volunteers are crucial to any event you host at your church. But keeping track of who’s on what volunteer team and when they are serving can be stressful. Especially if you’re depending on spreadsheets and shared docs. This is why we built Realm Volunteer Management. Create roles for volunteers and serving teams for all of your ministry areas. Add requirements for specific roles, such as background checks for your children and youth volunteers, to make sure you’re recruiting the right people. And speaking of recruiting, in Realm you can feature serving opportunities for your members to see what’s needed the most.
Volunteering isn’t all about just filling a space. You’re more likely to keep volunteers in their roles longer if they are the right fit for that serving opportunity. Your members can set their skills and interests and preferred serving times, and Realm matches them with possible roles that fit their preferences. This means not only are you getting a volunteer, but you’re more likely to get someone passionate about their serving role.
Realm takes it even a step further with its volunteer schedules. Create a schedule for each serving team and communicate that schedule with those volunteers. When something comes up and they’re unable to serve, they can find their own replacements to help you out.
4. Background Checks
As mentioned earlier, some roles require background checks, such as children and youth volunteers, greeters, financial volunteers, your staff, and more. However, running those screenings in an outside solution means you’re having to manually track dates and rescreening needs which makes things complicated.
With Realm Background Checks, you can run a background check directly through Realm. It’s as simple as clicking on the Screen button, choosing a package and add-ons, and entering basic information. You don’t even have to worry about collecting that person’s social security number or any confidential information as they will be sent an email to complete the screening application before it’s processed.
Once a screen is completed, you’ll be able to view a person’s background check history. And view those whose background checks will be expiring soon.
5. Church Website
If your job is to promote events, you know the frustration of having to recreate the same event multiple times to promote it. We’ve removed the need for you to do so by giving you a way to post an event to Realm and automatically have it show on your church’s website.
All thanks to one of the newest features in Realm: our integration with Refresh Websites, a website builder with pre-formatted templates you can choose from and customize for your church. The integration allows you to share events, groups, and giving opportunities directly to your website through widgets. Add as many pages as you need for your ministry, and add images. And edit colors and fonts to match your church’s branding.
6. Accounting
We’ve already covered online giving and event registrations, but let’s look one more step ahead at what happens once a gift is received in contributions and once a registration payment is made. If you’re using an outside solution for accounting, then we go back to exports and imports or manual entry.
But with Realm Accounting, the full journey of both online giving and event registrations stays within Realm. Your contribution batches and registration payments are posted to your general ledger and you don’t have to worry about spreadsheets or exports. Realm Accounting is a true fund accounting solution, so you build your chart of accounts as you need with segments allowing you to track sub-departments or campuses.
Summary
With these 6 features — online giving, event registrations, volunteer management, background checks, Refresh Websites, and accounting — integrated fully into Realm, you can simplify your processes by removing the need for multiple solutions. Realm is the church management solution built to grow your ministry without adding complications into your daily routine.
Simplicity is a never-ending responsibility, especially for growing churches. It must stay as a top priority, though. When it does, your church is ready to reach more people. Our newest resource, Fight for Simplicity as Your Church Grows, eliminates this frustration for you, your staff, and your church along with the other guides in the Know and Grow: Solutions to Large Church Problems. And, to make it even easier and so you don’t miss any of our Church Growth Resources, you can also receive our ministry blog posts straight to your inbox!
Leigh Ann Shelley joined the ACST team in 2019 as a Product Marketing Manager, overseeing the launch and overall communication of key solutions to support the church’s needs. Prior to joining ACST, she spent several years in communications and graphic design roles. Most notably as a Communications Director for a large church in Florence, SC, where she leveraged Realm to help solve key ministry challenges.
