Aspire ChMS
The Goal? Help churches to communicate better with their congregations by creating an easy-to-use software tool that manages church membership, resources, events and outreach programs, while automatically keeping the church website up-to-date.
Some features of Aspire include: Membership Management |
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Membership Management
- Track an unlimited number of people, households, and groups
- Customizable fields allow you to sort members by any criteria you track
- Members can update their own contact info or volunteer availability through your church website
- Select a group of people and send e-mail or generate mailing labels or form letters quickly and easily
Aspire provides a central location for tracking all the significant information for the people who attend your church. 
The software interface is designed to be quick and easy to navigate, with easy access to all functional areas in a few mouse clicks. No switching between different modules or software products required.
Flexible drop down lists let you define member status options such as Visitor, Member, Regular Attendee, or whatever categories you need.
It’s easy to view and edit household records and pull up any individual in the household.
The tabbed interface gives you quick access to:
- General information about an individual and their household data.
- Custom Fields to record mission trips, mailing codes, or whatever you want.
- Important Dates such as birthdays, anniversaries, baptisms, or classes completed.
- Involvement to see what groups each person belongs.
- Servant Profile to track spiritual gifts, interests, and abilities, results of background checks and record which days & times a person is available to serve in ministry.
- Communication preferences to designate which households should receive the newsletter or be included in the member directory.
- Permissions to access functions within the Aspire software.
- History to view a log of member status changes and personal notes.
With Aspire, you can assign people to Groups to enhance communications. Each Group can have their own page on the church website with a description, contact info, and a photo album if desired.
Members of a Group can send e-mail to other members through the church website. Group leaders can also manage the members of their group through the website or schedule team meetings that show up on the online calendar.
Powerful Search tools with drop-down selections and real-time data filtering let you find people in the database or create communication lists quickly and easily.
Contribution Reporting and Tracking
- Record contributions quickly and efficiently using a spreadsheet-style data entry form
- Seamless integration with QuickBooks for fund accounting
- Track pledges received vs. goals
- Generate contribution reports by household
You can set up an unlimited number of funds for use by your church. Any fund may be designated as a pledge fund. Pledge funds record weekly, monthly or annual pledges by individuals. Each fund may be designated as active or inactive, and tax deductible or non-tax deductible.
Each fund stores QuickBooks account information, which facilitates automatic, seamless posting of fund information into QuickBooks.
Aspire’s easy to use reporting functions provide a wide variety of reports, including; year-end tax receipts, and pledged vs. given comparisons by fund and individual, with just a few clicks of your mouse.
Contribution entry is fast, easy and fun with Aspire. For example, money counters log onto the system and open an embedded Excel spreadsheet that lists all members with their envelope numbers filled in and columns for check number, check amount, cash amount and columns for active funds. This allows for rapid entry of contribution data and summary for bank deposit. The church Treasurer then reviews the batch and clicks post. All individual and fund detail is then posted automatically, eliminating the time consuming entry of data on a person-by-person, and fund-by-fund basis.
Church Website Software
- No programming required to set up and maintain your church website.
- Each ministry and group in your church has its own homepage to display meetings, contact info, and photo albums
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- Homepage is automatically updated with current events and announcements.
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Members can log in to a private area of the church website to view a member directory, submit calendar items, update their contact info, or e-mail members of groups they’ve joined.
Aspire’s Church Website functionality allows you to set up and maintain your own church website with no programming required.
Aspire includes a variety of professionally designed website templates. Each template can be easily modified to portray the individual personality of your church by adding your own church graphics or logo.
Dynamic content boxes on the homepage will automatically cycle through current announcements, calendar items, staff info, photo albums and more.
With Aspire’s Website Wizard you can quickly and easily set up your Church Website.
The Website Wizard walks you step by step to create your church website. Need to change the service times displayed on your site? Jump to the Service Times step, type the new information and click Publish Website. It’s that easy.
Each ministry and group in your church has its own homepage to display meetings, contact information and user friendly photo albums.
Church Members can log in to a password-protected area of the church website to view a member directory, submit calendar items, update their contact information or e-mail members of groups they have joined.
Since your website is integrated with Aspire your website is kept current with calendar items, membership information, events, special ministry needs just to mention a few items that Aspire and your Church Website can share.
Desktop Publishing
- Create your church bulletin or newsletter faster using database-driven desktop publishing – just choose from a list of current events and announcements to drop in to a Word or Publisher document.
- Powerful mail-merge features make it easy to personalize letters, mailing labels, and even e-mail messages to individuals or groups in your church.
- Over 200 built-in design templates for bulletins, newsletters, brochures and more give your church communications a professional image – or use your own designs
- Create fully editable photo or address directories for the entire church or specific ministry groups.
Aspire is more than just a place to store information about people, events, and announcements. It has over 200 professionally designed templates to help you create printed publications for your church, including:
- Bulletins
- Newsletters
- Brochures
- Directories
- Form letters
- Mailing labels
Aspire takes advantage of the mail-merge functions built into Microsoft Word and Publisher to automatically populate bulletins or newsletters with current calendar events or announcements, reducing time and mistakes when creating these commonly used publications.
Office staff can easily create address directories or even photo directories to distribute to your staff and congregation.
Publications are created using the Aspire Publication Wizard. This tool allows your office staff to choose the type of publication to be created, layout and theme, and all the data to pre-populate into the final document.
The final step of the wizard will output your publication to Microsoft Word or Publisher, where it can be further edited to add your own graphics, colors, or clip art designs. You can also modify and save custom templates to use with Aspire.
Event / Calendar Management
- Keep all your meetings and events on a single shared online calendar that everybody can access
- Ministry leaders or small group leaders can request meetings and events on the church calendar through the church website
- Avoid double-booking by reserving rooms and equipment for an event
- Customizable calendar views allow you to view your entire church calendar or specific calendars for groups, rooms, or equipment.
Aspire’s calendar/event functionality has the familiar look and feel of Microsoft Outlook, along with many of the same capabilities; from a variety of calendar views to setting up recurring events.
You can choose to look at a church-wide/all events calendar, or at calendars for specific groups and ministries, even for specific rooms and resources.
Putting a new item on the calendar is fast and easy with Aspire’s all-in-one interface.
By completing the Who, What, When and Where portions of the screen, you establish and name the event, designate it as a church-wide event or assign it to a Group, set start and end times, reserve a room within the church or designate a location outside the church, and reserve resources for the event.
By clicking on other tabs on this screen, you can attach documents or photo albums, record contributions related to the event, and record attendance at the event.
By clicking on the communications tab, you can add the event to the website calendar, and create an announcement to be included in the church bulletin, newsletters, etc. And, you may choose to create a publication about the event, such as a brochure for a Women’s Retreat.
Because the Calendar is integrated with membership information in Aspire, you can choose, for example, to e-mail the brochure you just created to all of the women in the congregation with just a few of clicks of your mouse.
Conversion Software
Many new clients are converting from existing systems. Part of the “Back-office” Aspire Software is a conversion utility that is configurable to different source systems.
Current conversion configurations have been established for:
- Servant Keeper
- Membership Plus
- Church Windows
- Power Church
- Shepherd’s Staff
