First Baptist Church, located in Sulphur Springs, Texas, has a thriving ministry with an average attendance of 800 each week. Brady Fisher, the Director of Media and Communications for the past six years, helps maintain the church’s databases and technologies. Their central suite of products consists of Realm Connect with Online Giving and Realm Accounting from ACS Technologies. They also utilize Realm’s integrated Background Check solution powered by Verified First.
Brady has his hands in many areas of the church; however, he focuses primarily on the Media Ministry who run the sounds, lights, and everything media-related for their worship services. Streaming their services online and on a local cable channel each week means a lot of action behind the scenes, and Brady needed a strong solution to help manage and keep track of his team of 25 volunteers. Realm Volunteers fits his needs perfectly.
“Now using Realm, I’ve got them all opted in to text, so they all get reminders. They’re pretty good at accepting volunteer shift requests. I still have to manage a few, but I schedule it a month at a time. They [volunteers] are pretty good about responding, so if people decline, I can get replacements in there; they can also get replacements themselves, which is a nice feature.” Brady Fisher, Director of Media and Communications
Along with communications to his volunteers, Brady loves being able to send most of the church communications through Realm instead of needing third-party solutions. Reducing the use of outside programs and having everything centralized through Realm is more effortless for their staff.
A few other features FBC Sulphur Springs values most in Realm are Check-In and Event Registration. With Realm Check-In, they eliminated paper rolls and reduced the need to manually enter attendance. Realm Events enables them to accept payments online and manage their large events while keeping things organized. This has reduced the time the church staff was spending depositing checks and manually keeping track of payments.
“We also use registration events a lot. That’s probably really helpful for us, and it’s come a long way, I think, since we first got onto Realm, so it just helps us keep everything organized, and we can take payments. We have a lot of events going on all of the time, so it’s helpful to have it all in one place. I can see what is going on and see who is attending which event.” Brady Fisher, Director of Media and Communications
With FBC Sulphur Springs holding many events and Brady managing volunteers, Realm Background Checks is a vital tool for their ministry. The integration with Realm allows church staff to request the background check directly in Realm and see an up-to-date status to help them know when the results are ready to be viewed and when it’s time to re-screen volunteers.
With Realm Connect and its features and integrated add-ons, Brady and the rest of the staff at FBC Sulphur Springs can keep things organized and running smoothly.
To learn more about Realm from ACS Technologies, Click Here
To learn more about FBC Sulphur Springs, Click Here
About Stacey Smith
Stacey joined the ACST team in 1998 in the support department and joined the marketing team in 2021 as an Associate Marketing Coordinator. Today she runs the ACST Ministry Champions program, which involves all references, reviews, and testimonials for all of our products and services. When she isn’t at work, she is spending time with her husband, two teenage daughters and furbaby Copper.
