What are the next steps for our app?

“Finally I made it!” – 72-year-old Prudence calls me when she has confirmed her rota request for the coffee service on Sunday via the app. She just doesn’t really get along with email and browser. But once I installed the app on her smartphone, rota requests are no longer a problem.

This is our wish for the ChurchTools App: to offer simple solutions for the medium you currently have at hand.

In the meantime we have received a lot of feedback and wishes for the further development of the app from numerous churches. Thanks a lot for that! We would like to listen very carefully. So we collected the feedback, added our own ideas and arranged everything according to priorities.

With this blog post I would like to take you into the next steps that are planned for the app. We won’t be able to follow the order 100%, but you’ll get a short overview of where the journey will take us:

• Often you want to get more information about people you work with on Sunday or during the week. Do I know the family? Where does the family come from? What tags does it have?
• We want to integrate the exchange function in a smart way, so that the volunteers/or staff can provide replacements as independently as possible if they are unable to attend to their services themselves
• It should be possible to display agendas for events. It should be that simple, that the moderator of a sunday service can use the app directly without any further notes.
• The small group leaders can check in for groups directly in the app – perhaps even with a reminder function so that they don’t forget:)
• Better communication possibilities: E-mail has long since become obsolete among the younger generation. Here we want to offer other possibilities of communication.
• Everyone should be able to enter his or her own absences, so that the planners can plan even better and really put an end to annoying Doodle queries.
• The start page shall be improved and offer a welcome feeling. This includes the display of birthdays in my groups and other relevant information for me personally.
• The scheduled songs can be played and viewed directly. Another idea is to create an auto playlist of the songs for the next Sundays, so that the musicians can prepare themselves already during the week.
• As a participant in a small group, I would like to see who is in my group and also be able to communicate directly.
• Everyone already has a favorite calendar app in his or her smartphone. The user can therefore very easily subscribe to his or her interesting calendars directly.

Further functions are in the pipeline, but then it is more about editing content, such as editing group members, performing follow-ups, resource booking and rostering. Furthermore, we are also thinking about an offline mode. So it is possible to get information about people without internet connection.

We are also happy to invite you to discuss the app further and to submit ideas. There is now a separate category for this in our forum: To the Forum.