Dave Brazzle of the Immanuel Lutheran Church in Palatine, IL explains how the church and school uses Highrise and Backpack.
I am an Elder (lay leadership) at Immanuel Lutheran Church And School, located here in Palatine IL (a suburb of Chicago). In both our church and PK-8th grade school, we have fully embraced both Highrise and Backpack. To this powerful duo, we have added Formstack (formally Formspring), which is a web-based “Forms” resource. Here’s the story...
At our church, we have 13 Elders. Our elders are closely allied with our Pastor in doing ministry and keeping in contact with our members. Each of the Elders are assigned a subset of our membership, to whom they are responsible for keeping in touch, forming relationships and gathering feedback for the leadership. Reaching for such a goal requires an organized approach that fosters continuity, visibility, discipline and self-accountability. In searching for a viable solution, we had many requirements, not the least of which were security, confidentiality, reliability, remote-access, ease-of-use and many functional requirements. We finally stumbled upon the perfect solution; Highrise.
Highrise
We securely exported our church’s ACS database (a commonly used church database), processed and formatted the data using a custom–designed Excel spreadsheet, and then uploaded the resulting contacts into Highrise. Of critical significance, this spreadsheet allowed us to capture and maintain contact information, including birthdays, anniversaries, email addresses, phone numbers etc, from our church database, and automatically include them in the Highrises’ Background Information frame for each contact! We now have the ability to securely and responsibly maintain and (when appropriate) share our contact conversations. Higrise’s permissions features allow us to control access, limit visibility and protect confidentiality, as context requires.
We have begun using Highrise’s “Tasks” feature to contact members on their birthdays, wedding anniversaries, baptismal anniversaries and on the anniversaries of the death of loved ones. Tasks are also used to schedule periodic “maintenance” contacts or to schedule special follow-up contacts as appropriate. It all works perfectly.
Backpack
But wait, there’s more! We also are very heavy users of 37signals’ Backpack. Here, our problem was that we had dozens of ministries operating within the church and school. All of them had a need to communicate their missions, goals, resource needs, accomplishments, pictures, how to join in their ministry, etc. Yet few (well, OK one) of them were web-savvy enough to do anything about it. Although we have a Director of Technology on staff, his time is always in very heavy demand. The time required for dozens of ministries to each explain what they want to communicate on our church/school website(s) would be overwhelming. All of these ministries knew what they want to say, but they didn’t have a good, efficient and timely way of saying it.
The answer turned out to be Backpack. We now have dozens of pages, each one of them is literally “owned” by a ministry, a board, or a teacher in our school. It takes only a couple of hours to show them how to use Backpack... even for people who initially tell you that they “don’t do computers.” Many of them report that they have found their “page” empowering. Updates to these ministry pages occur daily, without consuming even a minute of our church’s staff. Each of the ministry Backpack pages, are transparently linked-to and accessed from our church’s main website page. People clicking on these links, scarcely even know that they have left our “normal” web site.
Fun idea for a Backpack page: a collection of your favorite quotations. You can even make it public and share it with the whole world. For example, here's Jason Fried's favorite quotes at Backpack. A sampling:
