Let a priest who is also a computer geek lend your parish a hand

Episcopal churches typically have unique needs for office computing, document creation, record-keeping, reporting, and communicating with members. But they often do not have someone available to them who is familiar with both computers and the church office environment.

Episcopal Computer Consulting was founded by an Episcopal priest with over 20 years’ worth of experience in using computers for church work. ECC can advise you about what kind of equipment to buy, how it should be hooked together, what software to use for membership record-keeping, financial accounting, and reporting to the national church, and how to secure these records to maintain privacy and protect against loss.

Episcopal Church Consulting will work with local vendors, technicians or volunteers to help you set up a computer system which will allow your church office to run more smoothly. By taking advantage of recent technology, many tasks can be done more quickly or easily, eliminating hours of manual labor or the use of expensive outside services. A well-designed church computer system allows you to do more in less time, and frees up more time of clergy, staff and volunteers to do ministry.

For example, by using the right software, information for the annual Parochial Report can be generated automatically, saving much effort in this traditionally burdensome chore. We can also make it easy for you to print multi-page worship booklets in house without manual assembly, to print pre-addressed newsletters without using mailing labels, or to generate and print updated parish membership directories (with or without photos) as often as you desire.

We can help you obtain website names and church e-mail addresses which incorporate your actual church name and are easy to remember. And we can also advise you about what to include in your parish website to make it both useful to existing members as well as attractive to visitors.

All of this need not be expensive. We realize that most Episcopal churches do not have large budgets for office automation. But we can show you a variety of strategies to keep your office computing costs down, and our advising fees are quite reasonable. Our goal is to help your church office by reducing the amount of staff time and volunteer labor needed to do routine tasks, as well as to allow you to do things to benefit your congregational ministries which formerly would have been too expensive or difficult for you to consider.

What we can do for your church office

After a free consultation, we create a custom computer plan for your church. We address such issues as:

• what computer hardware you may need
• what office printing hardware you may need
• connecting/networking office computers & printers together
• acquiring office internet service and hosting for a parish website
• identifying software which will make office tasks easier
• creating custom e-mail addresses for all staff & key volunteers
• providing for easy & automatic off-site backup of important documents & records
• providing strong security & privacy for private correspondence, financial records, etc.
• providing secure access to e-mail accounts from home or while traveling
• creating parish photo or non-photo directories in house
• using free and open-source software to keep costs down for small budgets
• providing the ability to create & show computer or photo presentations to a room-sized group without investing in expensive projectors or large screens
• simultaneously publishing newsletters and other general mailings to a parish website
• providing the ability for authorized staff and/or volunteers to log on to church computers from home or elsewhere
• protecting files and equipment from sudden loss or damage due to power spikes & outages
• easily acquiring the capability to create & print complete worship booklets in house
• deciding what to put in a good parish website, and how to self-publish it or find someone local who can do it for you
• automatically receiving faxes without having to print out the junk ones
• providing free & permanent protection of historical records from fire and other losses