Testimonies - Excellerate

Church Management / Check-In Testimonies

“I just wanted to say thank you very much for helping me out this morning. I am so grateful to have the ability to ring or email (be it on the other side of the world) and get the support necessary to ensure that our church management system works well. Thank you for being a vital part of that process.” — MANSFIELD, AUSTRALIA

“Makes me very happy! We have been using Excellerate since 2003….happy to see the update. A fresh look and easier interface! “ — OREGON CITY, OR

“It is the simplest most comprehensively dynamic, yet not rigid, (meaning very user friendly) database application I’ve ever used.” — MANILA, PHILIPPINES.

“I want to thank you on behalf of all our staff for your top-notch service. The program is great to work with, and the service that you’ve provided has been far beyond what we expected…” — STEINBACH, CANADA

“The program is GREAT!!!!!! So fast, easy and user-friendly. Thanks again.” — BENTON, KY

“We love your software and recommend it often….” — MORENO VALLEY, CA

“Your product has been such a blessing to me and my staff. The intuitive software and user interface is so easy… most of my staff can self teach themselves… Your support has been OUTSTANDING!” — TAMPA, FLORIDA

“I picked Excellerate software because of the versatility of the program when it comes to reports as well as considering price. No other software company could give me the attendance, absentee as well as numerous other reports we needed for our church. I checked out many companies, in fact, it took me over a year to choose which software to buy and not even [one of the more expensive companies] could show me the reports we needed.

Excellerate is fantastic when it comes to the information it can hold about each member and no matter what we need, if the program doesn’t already do it their wonderful support people make it happen!

I have never worked so much with a company and been as absolutely satisfied as I have with Excellerate and their staff. The investment is definitely worth it.” — SHELBYVILLE, TN

“We got on to Excellerate through an unexpected reference from another local church. I downloaded the demo version and started playing around with it – making extensive use of the Help menu. Within days I was able to find my way around and extracting more information than I could with our previous system. This led to further discussions (this time introducing some technical experts) and before long we were installing Excellerate as our new database.

Introducing Excellerate to our staff (around 50 of them at the time) was incredibly easy. I was able to do the training from a users perspective, unlike our previous database that required us to employ a technician who had to be trained in the USA. It would be true to say that 90% of what we wanted from a database was achievable by all staff from day one. Realistically most users requirements are pretty straight forward – “Give me Joe Publics phone numbers”, “I want to email all my team members” “How many 18 – 25 year olds do we have?”, “Who hasn’t been to our Friends of the Vision Course?”; “How many people are in a small group?”… All of that we could do immediately.

Then we got requests for speeding up registrations in the kids programs. Enter barcode readers and we could achieve this, even in our extension services that did not have direct access to our database.

Following this was a request for our volunteer pastoral care team to be able to enter records of their visits/counseling appointments from home – via a web interface. This was not a standard part of the Excellerate package, but for a reasonable fee the Excellerate team was able to open up this possibility for us, using individualized password access to only those records they had been assigned to.

We now have around 10,000 active records on our database and have an ongoing goal to ensure that each of those people is “known” (not just a number). We have 9 services and 4 locations operating every weekend and do not keep individual attendance records at these services. We strongly encourage all our people to belong to a small group, but we still have a significant number who do not. This is requiring us to make full use of the Visits/Counsel features of that database, in conjunction with the small group reporting. In this way it will be possible to find out who has not been contacted recently – and to do something about it.

I have recommended Excellerate to a number of churches in New Zealand – most of whom are now using it. One thing I wish I had recommended more strongly is for users to take advantage of the very reasonably priced support package. In the early days I thought I was being a nuisance because of the number of requests/questions I was asking of the support desk. What I found was a prompt response (usually within 24 hours) to what I thought were complicated issues (remember I’m not an expert – just a user who’s read the help menu!). Even the whole database conversion process was a breeze – happening with virtually no loss of productivity even when handled by someone like me.” — AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND

“The goal for us, as a church, is to be able to measure our progress as we work toward the goals that God has given us. Just as any successful business must consistently analyze and consider the state of its operations, we are determined to look at the true condition of our church. If the 4 main branches of our operation are WIN, CONSOLIDATE, DISCIPLE, and SEND, then we need to know the state of each of these areas. If we’re not winning people to Jesus, then we have no people to consolidate (help make solid). And if we’re not consolidating successfully, we have no people to disciple, and so forth.

Excellerate has enabled us to look at the reality of our successes and our failures. For instance, using excellerate’s web integration and cell leader reports, we saw that we were really struggling to WIN people to Jesus, especially the men. Our church had been growing, but we were under a bit of a false illusion that many of these new people were New Believers. But now we can see plainly whether or not our growth is coming from New Believers, or only from Christians moving into town or coming from other churches. This enabled us to go to God in prayer to ask for a breakthrough in this area. REAL NUMBERS can really be hard to look at sometimes. But excellerate has helped us to get out of the abstract and into reality.

We have also been able to track where we are struggling to Consolidate people after they’ve been won to Jesus. It’s especially helped our cell leaders to pastor their cell leaders as they’ve seen, from our weekly reports, the lack of follow-up, etc. from certain leaders. So, it’s been a great tool for raising better leaders in our church. The other benefit is this… we get to celebrate when we see a break through! And we know when we’ve had a breakthrough now. It used top be very hard to know what was happening in all of the cell groups. Are they growing? How many people are in our cells? Do they have 1st time visitors? Are the cells winning people to Jesus? If so, which ones? How’s the men’s net doing? How’s the women’s net doing? How about the Youth? etc. etc.

Through Excellerate’s existing features and the ones being developed, Excellerate has and will be a great blessing to Mercy Church and to the work of the Kingdom. Not to mention the ongoing and friendly technical support. I have appreciated, very much, the personal support and willingness to make the program suite our church’s specific needs. It’s a great program!” — SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA

“My kids man the [check-in] stations…. Your system is easy enough for my 10 year olds to manage. I love keeping them involved directly in the ministry.” — WELLINGTON, FLORIDA

“Please accept this as a job well done. I experienced an unusual situation where as I had an older version that could not be loaded on the CPU that I now have. (On top of that, I purchased the wrong support plan for what I needed to do.) Your team walked me through the process and I actually felt as if they were holding my hand. I emailed numerous times (at least enough to make the average person annoyed). Their tone was always pleasant and very informative.

It is such a pleasure to work with a company that cares about what happens to you after you purchase the product. Great relationship building skills were shown here. Thank you, Excellerate!” — THOMASVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

Using the check scanner program to directly input our members giving has been such a time saver! It has cut in half the number of times we have to handle every check thus greatly reducing our processing and data entry time. Not to mention that it has also helped us to ensure that we are accurately reporting our members contributions. We love it!” — THE LIFE CHURCH OF MEMPHIS

Definately recomend this program to anyone who is looking to have only ONE system for their entire organization. — LAS VEGAS, NV

“My decision to use your product had a lot to do with the customizable reports. They are very well done and easy to tweak when need be. I also like the interface with the software. It is intuitive, and I appreciate the fact that I could customize the member table view by adding and deleting fields. I am very impressed with your software.” — KOKOMO, IN

Since we have installed the Excellerate system we have reduced the amount of time it takes to count and record our tithes and offerings from 8 – 10 hours to as little as 40 minutes. We continue to find new ways to take advantage of the flexibility and utility of the system. We recently automated our on-line giving to load directly into the Excellerate system saving even more time. The support has been excellent. The Excellerate team will do everything they can to ensure that your needs are met. I reviewed many systems before selecting Excellerate and without a doubt I made the right choice. — MYRTLE BEACH, SC

I’m also THRILLED that it is so user friendly! — DREXEL HILL, PA

You guys have been phenomenal in the transition, really fast support. Thanks — EAST HARTFORD, CT

SERVEPOINT TESTIMONIES

“ServePoint is Awesome! Scheduling is so easy, and we can instantly communicate with all of our teams. With almost 2000 volunteers, it would be impossible to live without it!” — THE LIFE CHURCH OF MEMPHIS

I really like all the functions of the database… For our church it is definately a great thing for us and a huge asset… — MADISON, ALABAMA

We love the serve-point software and want to thank you for this awesome tool. — CLARKSVILLE, TN

Thank you for your fast response and outstanding customer service! — CLARKSVILLE, TN