PATERSON At the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist here, the ever-growing parish community has recently upgraded its parish database from excel files to eCatholic ChMS, a church management software programmed connected to eCatholic. From accounting to the ministry work of a parish, eCatholic ChMS is an information hub that is meant to build relational ministry.
Ivannia Vega-McTighe, director of family faith formation at the cathedral, said, “The reason we wanted to utilize eCatholic ChMS is because we felt it was a great tool to connect with the families in our parish community. We thought it was great that it was also connected to eCatholic, which has been great through this process of setting us up.”
Parishes around the Diocese are already be familiar with eCatholic, which hosts many of the Church of Paterson’s websites including the diocesan website rcdop.org.
Mary Lennon, diocesan director of the Office of Technology, assisted the cathedral staff in upgrading to eCatholic ChMS. She said, “eCatholic ChMS is such a great option for parishes to manage parish data. It’s secure and the information is in a safe place. It’s also user-friendly for any parish staff member.”
eCatholic ChMS lays the groundwork for a parish and it provides streamlined software, which integrates with other tools for online giving, accounting, and envelopes. The software is accessible from anywhere and parish staff can manage data on any device — desktop, tablet, or mobile phone. The software also provides secure cloud hosting so parishes don’t have to worry about losing data or upgrading software.
According to Vega-McTighe, eCatholic has provided “phenomenal customer service support” as the parish upgrades to the software. It is also affordable and budget friendly for parishes, which also appealed to the cathedral staff. “There are so many different modules to use for the many different areas of serving a parish,” she said.
Because the data is arranged based on households, Vega-McTighe has been able to identify the important church milestones within a family. Prior to the new software program, children who received their Sacraments were individually listed. “We are able to see what’s happening for a family and their big life events for the Sacraments,” she said. “For example, if a child is baptized, we can remind the families as the child gets older to register the child for religious education classes so they can prepare for First Communion and later on for the Sacrament of Confirmation.”
Vega-McTighe also said there is a tool for parish committees that “is a great way to organize and save data for the different ministries of a parish. The parish can keep track of families, individuals, committees, Offertory envelopes, donations, Sacraments, and more.”
According to the eCatholic website, “With an intuitive interface and lightning-fast load times, eCatholic ChMS helps you take back your schedule so there’s more time to be with the people. The program was designed by Catholics for Catholics. It is family-centric as opposed to individual members, which allows you to quickly access parishioner or church information to be able to better serve the community.”
eCatholic ChMS is offering a preview of the church management software for parishes to get a demonstration of how the software works through eCatholic's sales department. Lennon will be available for parishes with any questions. In addition, eCatholic will assist parishes every step of the way for the initial set-up. Its support team will do the conversion of the data and also train the members of the staff who will be using the software. Parishes will also have the continued ongoing support of eCatholic. Lennon told The Beacon, “eCatholic is continuing to add integrations between eCatholic's website tool and the eCatholic ChMS. They already have the direct integration with eCatholic payments as well as a family registration module and will be releasing in a few weeks the religious education module.”
Information: Mary Lennon at [email protected] or eCatholic.com/chms.