So, if you use Fellowship One, you know that there were significant issues with Check In today. Even if you don’t use F1, you might have seen the traffic on twitter about the issues. I know that for some churches, the slow-down was crippling. Most of the morning, I was watching the twitter stream and saw all kinds of tweets. Most were encouraging, some were certainly frustrated. I thought that it was interesting that today happened the way that it did because I’m in the process of finalizing my outline for a workshop I’m leading at the Kidmin Conference in Chicago and the subject of the workshop ties into what happened today.
Here at Gateway, check in was as fast as it always is… maybe even faster. It actually didn’t really matter than Fellowship One was down because we had a backup plan. About 2 years ago we bought those over-priced church nursery, two-part stickers to use in the event of an internet outage or issues on F1’s end. In the three years I’ve been at Gateway, this is the first time we’ve not been able to use electronic check-in. Being that this was the first, everything went pretty flawless? Why, because many years ago we put a system in place to anticipate what would happen with a check-in failure and today we put the system in process.
I’m sure there are people who are really upset with Fellowship One right now. I bet they’ve already gotten some mean-spirited phone calls and even a dirty email or two.
Was Fellowship One at fault? For not being able to provide electronic check-in…Â absolutely!
Were they at fault for churches having a bad check-in experience today? Absolutely not! I’m pretty sure that in documentation and training, they clearly communicate how important it is to have a back-up plan. If churches had a horrible check-in experience because there was no back-up plan or the back-up plan was poorly designed, that’s no one’s fault but the leadership over that church’s check-in.
This is the beauty of systems. Anticipate what is or is likely to happen and put a plan in place. When you become aware of the systems your organization needs, ministry becomes more efficient, effective and immune to road bumps like F1 users experienced today.
GREAT post! We too got to go through our supply of over-priced 2-piece church nursery stickers … but SO worth it this morning to have a plan and implement the plan … check-in was the same, but with a different style … kids still went to class … safety wasn’t breached … and we were all reminded why we should be thankful for all the people who keep F1 running 99.99% of the time 🙂
Yeah, I was actually a little excited when I got the call that F1 wasn’t working right. We have not used our back-up plan that we set in motion 2 years ago, so I was giddy to give it a try. We only ran into one or two issues I hadn’t thought of, but we’ll get that right before the next time we have to go to plan B.
Hey we use a database company called Connection Power that integrates with the churchwide assimilation process as well as church giving. I was in the middle of making some significant changes with check-in and few other things when they told us to hold off becuase an outside company just bought them and fellowship1. They said we would let us know what all that means within the next few months. Have you heard anything about this????
I imagine you’re probably referring to this: https://childrensministryonline.com/technology/fellowship-one-joins-active-network/
Active networks did buy F1 a few months ago… I’m not sure about Connection Power… but maybe they did. I wrote about it in the link above.
Could you supply info on those expensive 2 piece church nursery stickers? Would love to have a better “Plan B” than we have. Thanks!
We use the simple 2 part tags here: http://www.churchnursery.com/
We don’t have a great manual check-in system and wondered if you could share your process for when F1 goes down (which it did for us two Sundays ago). Thanks!