Overview of SeekerWorks™

 

SeekerWorks™ is software developed for your church or ministry.  It will help you manage all of the People associated with your ministry, as well as their personal information, spiritual gifting and where they fit with your organization. It will help you assimilate new people into your ministry, place people in a small group, and find a meaningful place for volunteer service.  You can also manage Campaign Teams for a Capital Campaign or other activity, such as Saddleback's 40 Days Of Purpose Campaign, while keeping the teams separate from your ongoing volunteer ministries.

 

Other Information features allow you to manage Attendance Totals, a Calendar for your church or ministry organization as well as personal calendars for you and your staff.  A Chart/Graph Analysis function is available to see trends for attendance, giving, pledges, etc.  A Reports function will give you hard-copy or viewable reports, or allow you to send them to a text file.  Lastly, you can add tasks to your To-Do List or to another user's To-Do List, as needed.

 

You can manage Gifts/Pledges by date, giving unit and category, then view the totals and drill down for analysis purposes.  If you need to manage a Capital Campaign, you can set up a Gift Category to segregate campaign gifts from unrestricted giving, as well as restricting funds for other designated purposes. You can track pledges for any category and compare them with actual giving.

 

Giving Reports are available for printing also.  You can print daily totals by category for reconciliation with your accounting system, compare giving with pledges by month, print giving statements for your donors, etc.

 

Various Tables and Utilities are available also, such as the Auto Key Table, useful for reducing the amount of keying necessary to put in an address.  With this feature, you can type the first character of your city and it will fill in the rest of the city, the state and zip code and default area code for all phone numbers.  The Ministry Group feature is used to manage the groups you want to track in your organization, as well as the rules for graduating people from one group to the next.  The School List feature allows you to link a student with a school, then view who's at what school.  The Delete functions, while dangerous, can remove all information and allow you to start fresh (Note: there is no way to get the data back once it is deleted, unless you backed up your data files before hand.)  The "Run a Batch Program" button shows a list of programs with a description of what they do for specific en masse updates.  Your Security Administrator can also control who has access to what function as well as reset passwords or create new users and prevent unauthorized access and/or modifications.

 

The Import/Export features of SeekerWorks™ include exporting contacts to Microsoft® Outlook or Outlook Express (Microsoft® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation).  You can also export other comma-separated-value files (files with an extension of .csv) for mail-merge or what-if analysis with a word processor, such as Microsoft® Word or Microsoft® Excel.  You can also generate a mass email to every email address in the database, switch to Microsoft® Outlook, fill in the text of the message you want to send and send it!

 

You can load and print mailing labels or rosters for a predefined group, such as all Members, Ministry Directors, etc., or as selected manually for individuals or households.

 

Every function in SeekerWorks™ has 4 levels of security available.  At one end of the spectrum is No Access, meaning a user cannot access any of the screens for that function.  Next is Inquiry Only Access.  Next is Modify Only Access (a user can Add or Modify, but not Purge/Delete).  At the other end of the spectrum is Purge Access, which includes Add, Modify or Purge capabilities.

 

Finally, this software will only be as good as the diligence you practice in keeping the data up-to-date and accurate.  We recommend you appoint someone as a Data Administrator, responsible for coordinating and maintaining the data, as well as implement a plan to assist that person in this endeavor.  You won't regret it.