Looking for a membership & accounting program for a church?

Question

I have looked at several demo programs but haven't found one that I really like. What experience have you had with your programs? All comments from your experience will be appreciated.

Answer 1

For my spouse's local (200+-member) club, I maintain the membership as Contacts in Outlook, giving them Categories of various types. (They have various levels of membership. We categorize our *personal* contacts with separate Categories so as to classify them separately, but I suppose, you could just as well classify them, in effect, by "omission" of category.) This manner of maintaining a membership has the added benefit of letting you use Outlook mail merge to print, say, mailing labels for newsletters, lists of members, and the like.

We maintain budgets in Excel, and other items in Word. I maintain their website free as a Google space, plus blog, plus Google Group, plus public interactivity email. (BTW, Google offers a set of Office-like software for all these purposes too - contacts, spreadsheet, document editor, etc. - but there's not a mail-merge...)