We have completed the first stage of our evaluation of the companies and products on our ChMS short list using the high-level criteria I posted a couple of days ago. Based on that evaluation, we have narrowed our choices to Fellowship One and Shelby Arena. Fellowship Technologies will be here Wednesday and Shelby Systems will be here Thursday to demo their products to our Evaluation Team.

Blackbaud took themselves out by not responding to our requests for information in a timely way. We’re on a tight schedule and they simply didn’t respond fast enough for us to evaluate them.

My visit to ACS was spectacular. They are a great company top to bottom, but their products aren’t able to meet our needs right now. Based on a brief conversation with them, I’m pretty sure they would agree with that. If you’re looking for a ChMS, you should definitely check them out. You won’t find a more capable yet humble and gracious company. I’m grateful to have met Hal, Ben, Pattie, and others at ACS and to be able to call them friends, not to mention uber RoundTable buddy, Dean (you rock!).

I love Microsoft CRM as a platform. As with all Microsoft products, there’s always a new version (4.0 in this case) just around the corner which always promises to be even better than what they have now. In all seriousness, it does appear that this is going to become a better and better option for churches in the coming years. The question for us is: what kind of solution can we actually buy and implement now?

The MSCRM platform has two competing church-specific solutions: Proclaim CRM from Ministry Management Solutions and ProVision CRM from The ACTS Group. We didn’t have time to look closely at both products, so we started with ProVision. After a refreshingly candid conversation about our requirements and our time line, The ACTS Group withdrew from consideration. Some of the functionality we need is still in development, so they can’t yet demonstrate a complete working solution for us. A year from now it would be a completely different situation, but we need to make our decision now based on functionality they can actually deliver now. Keep an eye on this because with Tony involved, you know it’s going to be good.

As I said, we haven’t taken a close look at Proclaim mainly because there are only so many hours in the day and you have to draw the line somewhere. If perchance we don’t fall in love with Arena or Fellowship One, Bill Walker is just a phone call away.

And then there were two.

Two more things caught my eye in the last few days regarding social networking and the church.

First, Joe Suh of Digital Leadnet offered some thoughtful comments about how APIs for social networking sites will allow people to use many of them simultaneously. I’ve spoken about his previously, citing the thinking of Dave Winer that Twitter could become the de facto standard for sharing personal identity. (Remember when Microsoft tried to do this with Passport?)

Second, Robert Scoble did a video demo of Zude. The way the demo unfolds requires you to have a lot of patience. If you hang in there, after 10-15 minutes the power of Zude will start to become apparent. Zude is a social network like Facebook, etc. but it has a very powerful way for non-programmers to create, layout, and dress up their pages. More importantly, the demo shows how it allows for an extreme level of interoperability with other social networking systems. Also interesting is the fact that Zude is built on a web application framework and stack called Open5G that seems vaguely competitive with the much-heralded Ruby on Rails.

In the marketing section of my feed reader, along with Church Marketing Sucks, Kem Meyer, Seth Godin, and others, I have recently added Katya Andresen’s blog, “Getting to the Point“. Great stuff. For example, check out her recent post on Millennials and their social conscience. More food for thought about the Internet Campus.

As promised, here is Eric Busby’s presentation from last Thursday morning at the RoundTable. It includes links to all of the sites he mentioned.

We didn’t have much time to process or discuss Eric’s ideas last week. Perhaps we could do that here in the comments. What is your reaction to Eric’s talk? How has it influenced your thinking?

digital.leadnet.org is a valuable new resource. I find myself bookmarking several things a week. Check out:
Saving a Generation through MySpace
Technology Shaping Culture – the “Thumb Generation”
Reaching the Post-Congregational Christian
Teens Search Faith Online

I have been drawn to each of these posts as food for our thinking about a new Internet Campus at Resurrection.

Rather than having a paper evaluation form at the end of the RoundTable, we decided to take a cue from Tony and solicit your feedback right here on the blog for everyone to see.

Some of you have already given feedback on your own blogs. That’s cool. It would be good to comment here too so Terrell (and Terry?) can read everything in one place.

If you were here in any capacity or for any portion of the event, please share your thoughts: good, bad, or indifferent. I have a thick skin, so don’t spare my feelings. Better yet, make a specific, actionable suggestion to our next hosts.

If you don’t feel comfortable posting here for everyone to see, e-mail me at clif.guy at cor.org.

I definitely benefited from all of the comments after the Sugar Creek RoundTable. Amy and I did everything possible in our planning to take that feedback into account. Let’s give the same benefit to our next hosts.

Tony did a very nice job moderating our closing discussion on “CITRT: Where do we go from here?” Some conclusions:

1. When we get together in future, vendors will be invited and allowed to speak during the roundtable sessions. However, we strongly encourage vendors to send IT, engineering, product development, or consulting people – not sales people. We want to relate as peers with the upper managers who run the data centers, lead the software development, and manage the engineers. Regardless of title, we will start throwing things at vendors if they start getting “sales-y” and they won’t be invited back. We know when we’re being pitched, and it will make us very cranky! Also, when we’re talking about a vendor or competitor, that’s the time for them to just shut up, listen, and take a ton of notes. That seems fair enough. We absolutely require the ability to speak openly in our sessions without worrying if we’re saying the wrong thing or hurting someone’s feelings. As far as I’m concerned, people like Dean Lisenby, Curtis Simmons, and Nick Nicholaou (and others) have demonstrated that they understand our community and know how to be a vital and healthy part of it. Any vendor who patterns their behavior after those guys will be on very safe ground.

2. Our next CITRT will be in connection with MinistryTECH in April 2008. Can’t wait!

3. We will plan on two national CITRT events per year – spring and fall. Budget accordingly. Plan to come to at least one of these events each year. If you have multiple staff, you can send some to one and some to the other in order to keep things running back at your home church while others are away at the RoundTable.

4. The CITRT events might be hooked on to other conferences (such as MinistryTECH), but they will be in churches, not convention centers or hotels. A big part of the experience for us is seeing and being in the host church. Let’s not lose that.

5. Rather than starting yet more groups, associations, websites, etc., let’s look for technical ways to aggregate and leverage existing structures (tagging, blogrolling, feed aggregating, etc.). Eric Busby’s talk on Thursday morning spoke directly to that idea. I couldn’t agree more. See also the thoughtful post from Jason Reynolds on this topic.

To those of you who honored us by coming to Church of the Resurrection, thank you. It meant more than you can know. God is in this my friends. Let’s keep it going.

Here are all the Fall 2007 RoundTable-related posts I’ve found so far.

Tony Dye:
http://tonydye.typepad.com/main/2007/10/cor-citrt-pre-e.html

Andrew Mitry:
http://www.anchorite.org/blog/2007/10/03/pre-roundtable-at-cor/
http://www.anchorite.org/blog/2007/10/03/unity-in-the-body-of-christ/
http://www.anchorite.org/blog/2007/10/05/roundtable-roundup/

Jason Powell:
http://www.jasonpowell.net/jason_powell_church_it/2007/10/cor-senior-past.html
http://www.jasonpowell.net/jason_powell_church_it/2007/10/eric-busby-via-.html
http://www.jasonpowell.net/jason_powell_church_it/2007/10/cor-roundtable-.html
http://www.jasonpowell.net/jason_powell_church_it/2007/10/is-tony-live-or.html

Bryson Medlock:
http://www.bamed.org/2007/10/03/packing/
http://www.bamed.org/2007/10/03/not-your-usual-helpdesk-call/
http://www.bamed.org/2007/10/05/im-home/

Ian Beyer:
http://netplumber.blogspot.com/2007/10/recovering-from-citrt.html

Nick Nicholaou:
http://ministry-it.blogspot.com/2007/10/fall-church-it-roundtable.html

Jim Walton:
http://churchtechmatters.com/2007/10/02/church-it-roundtable-starts-today/
http://churchtechmatters.com/2007/10/02/citrt-day-1-pre-event/
http://churchtechmatters.com/2007/10/03/opening-morning-session-citrt/
http://churchtechmatters.com/2007/10/03/goodbye-citrt-hello-kci-and-beyond/

Justin Moore:
http://www.wantmoore.com/blog/archives/2007/09/28/church-it-roundtable-kansas-city/
http://www.wantmoore.com/blog/archives/2007/10/03/pre-cit-rt/
http://www.wantmoore.com/blog/archives/2007/10/03/church-it-round-table-day-1/
http://www.wantmoore.com/blog/archives/2007/10/03/day-one-round-table-wrap-up/
http://www.wantmoore.com/blog/archives/2007/10/04/church-it-roundtable-id-system/
http://www.wantmoore.com/blog/archives/2007/10/05/roundtable-asterisk/

Jim Edwards:
http://itchurch.com/?p=112

Jason Reynolds:
http://churchcio.com/hello-to-everyone-at-the-church-it-roundtable
http://churchcio.com/two-church-it-roundtable-goodies

David Szpunar:
http://infotech.lakeviewchurch.org/2007/10/03/whew-im-not-jason/
http://infotech.lakeviewchurch.org/2007/10/03/room-b-morning-discussion-notes/
http://infotech.lakeviewchurch.org/2007/10/04/church-it-roundtable-pre-dinner-wednesday-recap-and-more/
http://infotech.lakeviewchurch.org/2007/10/04/planet-citrt-aggregated-roundtable-feeds/
http://infotech.lakeviewchurch.org/2007/10/05/on-my-way-back-and-thanks/

John Ventry:
http://johnventry.blogspot.com/2007/10/church-it-roundtable.html
http://johnventry.blogspot.com/2007/10/great-round-table.html

Andrew Conard:
http://thoughtsofresurrection.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/that-must-be-an-it-guy/

Mobile Ministry Magazine:
http://mobileministrymagazine.com/2007/10/church-it-roundtable-currently-underway.html

Me:
http://appianway.blogspot.com/2007/10/day-one-whew.html
http://appianway.blogspot.com/2007/10/thursday-opening-session.html
http://appianway.blogspot.com/2007/10/all-i-can-say-is-wow.html

An open letter to all Fall 2007 Church IT RoundTable attendees:

When people started responding to my RoundTable invitation, it wasn’t long before I realized it was going to be “off the hook!” Little did I know.

My friends, the last three days go down as the #1 highlight of my ministry at Resurrection so far. And YOU did it. All it took was for you to gather at our place. That’s it. I honestly believe the planning doesn’t matter much because the Holy Spirit shows up, is evident in your lives and on your faces, and gets everyone else fired up. It’s a positive feedback loop. The more pumped you are, the more pumped everyone else is. Wow!

Remember when I said one of our three main purposes for this RoundTable was inspiration? In the planning for this event, I was very conscious that we needed to create opportunities for inspiration to happen. I hoped, planned, and prayed that YOU would be inspired, but oddly, I didn’t expect ME to be the one inspired. Our great God had other ideas in mind. I ended up being inspired – not by any particular content, session, or moment – just by being with all of you.

Only upon reflection this evening did I fully confront the fact that I’ve been considering quitting. I don’t know how long God will continue to call me to serve in my current capacity, but I’ll tell you right now that I’m not quitting. Tonight I have rededicated myself to the work God has set before me. Why? Because the Holy Spirit, working through you in some kind of mysterious way that none of us can understand or articulate, has reignited my passion for this work. Thank you. You have been an immeasurable blessing to me.

MinistryTECH won’t come soon enough …

Did I hear correctly that this man might be presenting to the opening session Thursday morning? Cool!