Modern Church Leader
Hear pastors share what's working in their churches. Welcome to Modern Church Leader, a show for church leaders to learn business strategies, leadership skills, church tech tips, and generosity. Tune in for powerful interviews to help you grow your church to be more effective, efficient, and powerful for the kingdom of God. For more information, visit https://www.mclconference.com/
Modern Church Leader
Efficient Church Administration for Mission Success w/ Jared Romano
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Hey guys, frank here with another episode of Modern Church Leader. I'm here with Jared Romano. Jared, what's going on, man?
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show, thank, you so much for having me. It's been I'd say I've been a fan of the podcast for a while and honored to be a guest. We've gotten to know each other in this world for a while, and then yeah, just my pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah, we have. We have a lot of great guests on this show, so thanks for coming on. Where are you? Well, I mean, let's just kind of jump in like where are you coming to us from and like give us a little bit of your story into where you're at today working on church mission software.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as a previous listener, the popular Nashville Tennessee. Lots of guests from Nashville.
Speaker 2:I mean so many, so many folks from Nashville.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we definitely post-COVID and I'm part of the problem. I was Los Angeles when we met all those years ago, moved from LA to Nashville, tennessee, but I didn't go south, I didn't go to Franklin, I went a little bit north and we've got a farm, little 20 acre farm, north of town and then one of the co-founders of a mission software and a pastoral software called Go and Growth Method and then, yeah, just I guess, a serial entrepreneur along the way. Definitely born and raised on the front row of the church.
Speaker 1:My father was an Assemblies of God AG pastor's kid and so really grew up Sunday morning church, sunday night you had Monday off, but Tuesday was band practice, wednesday was midweek service, thursday was youth group. I mean, really spent my time. Even Saturday night at 10 pm was prayer for Sunday morning's three services. So I really grew up behind the scenes of the church and then that is oddly placed me upon my father's retirement as a pastor. He actually goes into missions work and becoming not a quote, unquote missions pastor. But the gentleman who took the church over was from South Africa for my father and they became very close and fast friends and through that process he says I want to take you to South Africa, I want you to see where I'm from. And that sparked in him missions, work and then many, many over, I believe, 30 different trips to Africa and Bulgaria and.
Speaker 1:Haiti and all these different areas. He had this kind of techie son and what he did in terms of ministry we've been trying to do in terms of technology, and so we built different technology platforms. I think maybe what we talk about today is some of those missions sides of things, but a real burden and a heart for missions and built and and built a, built a service and built a, a platform for the church to be more efficient with those things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and that's where we connected. You know four or five years ago.
Speaker 2:Um, I don't remember exactly what happened but, right, we probably had shared customers somehow. And one of us reached out and we're like, hey, we should, you know, we should, you know, do some sort of integration, we should somehow partner up. And you know, that was that was ages ago. But yeah, tell us about. You know what's the name of the company and the product and what does it do for churches and how does it help kind of missions trips and missions organizing get better?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. So, yeah, I think you're right. I think it was Nashville was a meetup and I got to meet your team and we were really, really excited to partner together. What Go Method is the name of the company, so Go Method is this and you guys rebranded right, like you were Focus Mission.
Speaker 2:Originally we were Focus Ministry and then you reb, we were Focus Ministry.
Speaker 1:And then you re-branded.
Speaker 2:Focus Ministry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we had a small organization by the name of the Catholic Church had bought up a bunch of different acronyms and trademarks the Fellowship of Catholic University Students is the acronym FOCUS and so we said, oh my goodness, we're getting all these different young Catholic organizations signing up on our website and confusing back and forth. And so there was a rebrand right around 2020 to Go Method, and so Go Method being any sort of event, whether it be we've sometimes said concerts and men's retreats and staff retreats, any sort of gathering of 10 or more folks there's a tremendous amount of paperwork that goes with it and background checks and costs and all of that. And our background for Go Method is any sort of missions and administration space as well as helping fundraise. And so if you were to kind of structure your standard missions pastor or events leader inside of the four walls of the church, there's a website that you've got to put together and you've got to advertise your events. Well, we come alongside and we create that for you. Then you're an individual, like Frank is either maybe bringing the kids and he's a trip leader, or maybe, individually, you have an interest in going international this year.
Speaker 1:Well, now we've got to get your allergies and we've got to understand the heart and your testimony. We've got to maybe pull a legal background check just to ensure the safety of the organization, and then we've got to come to an approval process. So that approval process all happens within the software, making sure that we protect the organization. And then now it's homework time for someone in Frank's position. So now I've got permission slips and I've got standards of conduct, digital signatures. I need your passport front and back. I need expiration dates. I need usually around 15 to 20 different assets from the individual, and so we become the signatures, we become the document storage, but really we become the reminder system, which is a lot of the time that is spent. I always joke with missions pastors how many times have you signed the documents on the way to the airport? And they go, oh, like every trip.
Speaker 1:So it's that protection time savings. Going back to my father, he had that three ring binder with the pleather cover on it and that was his way of doing things and each trip had a tab and he had 200, 300 pieces of paper per event and broken down by these 20 different people. Unless you were as manual as his process was, something's going to fall between the cracks. And so, looking at his process, gosh, 10 years ago now, we've been Go method and focus missions. We have taken all of that and then finally came to the side of like, well, what's the last piece of this puzzle Is we've got to start accepting money on behalf of our organizations, because it's really not real until you maybe put a deposit down and solidify your seat. But now here's a six-month process where we're training and we're getting ready. We've got to start fundraising during that time. We've got to start fundraising during that time. And that's really where the light came on, I think, in our friendship and our relationship was there's nobody that can stop a software administration software, like your finance director. So what we've learned very, very quickly is working inside of the organization is sure we can make the trip goer, remind them and get them engaged and walk them through the process. We can work with different databases and we can make sure that all of the legal side of things are being taken care of, but the finance piece is a huge element of guiding the individual.
Speaker 1:How much more do I have to raise? Is it easy for me to raise More than likely? That individual, at least in the past, was up to doing a GoFundMe themselves or making their own PayPal account or those sorts of things where we've actually tasked the individual to go on Facebook and promote themselves and find a way to get that money to the church. So our heart was working with that finance director to make sure. The same way that you would be able to give through Tithely on a Sunday morning and give a donation or give a tithe is the same process. It is to support an individual going on an event or to pay for my own trip. Maybe you guys don't do fundraising or anything and it's just part of paying that $2,200 to go on that event. I can set up a little payment plan there and I can start paying towards that through tithing.
Speaker 2:So you I mean I guess layman's terms right For someone who doesn't run you make it, I guess layman's terms right for someone who doesn't run you replace the entire offline paper-driven or Excel spreadsheet-driven system with purpose-built technology for mission trips. That's the heart. Set up the mission trip and then they can organize all the tasks and then they can have people sign up to come on the mission trip and help them go through the sign up and approval process and then all the way to the point of if the person has to fundraise or wants to fundraise, or if the church as part of their mission trip, they do fundraising like they can fundraise right on the platform versus using GoFundMe or some other method, versus using GoFundMe or some other method.
Speaker 1:That's the heart of it and being able to take that and then repurpose that time of actually managing it. So one thing that we get to share is, if that process is worked through, the background checks and the databases and Tithely and all of these pieces coming together it's about 100 hours of administration time. If I was the one leading that event, I'd be 100 hours of my time that I get back, and then the goal here is to do more with that time.
Speaker 2:So if I'm that missions director or communications person or really it's I joke, miss Betty, but it's Miss Betty's time that we're returning who's picking up the phones and is also Just, miss Betty used to be able to do one mission trip a year and now she can do 10 of them. Like Correct, just because you gave her 10 times the time, as a superpower, to go do more mission trips if they want to. Right, like you. Just like. One person doesn't need to spend all year doing one mission trip because it's so like, it's just so much work. Right Like. They can go do a bunch more now.
Speaker 1:And the heart is more delightful. I was going to say it's a. We would always joke. There's the difference between my father's generation. And then the person replacing my father is coming out of school and he's 27 years old and he's getting his first job. At his trip or at the church, he expects an Apple level of technology. My dad went from a three ring binder to the level of Apple technology.
Speaker 1:And to meet in the middle of those places of saying, yeah, we're going to use technology to time save, but all of that is really in the heart of administration time saved so that we can do other stuff. And even a lot of organizations will say, well, we have an organization that we partner with to do those sort of missions, trips and things of that nature, which is great, Um, but there's likely a time in in your one year of as a church where you're gathering people together and moving them to another location, uh, that that could look like those concerts. That could look like men's retreats, those could look like, um, any sort of, uh, traveling moment. There's usually parent consent form there. There's usually some sort of background adult next to children sort of thing that's worth looking into and we could just automate and make those things a little bit more efficient in the world of events. How?
Speaker 2:what does a normal or like cause you have an interesting view or vantage point into? Like church missions trips, like all over the US and maybe further right, so you get to see like lots of them versus what one person at one church might see. So, like I don't know, tell us a little bit like what have you learned? What have you seen over the years? Like, what do general missions trips look like and how big are they? How many people go, how much money do people raise to go do them? How do they celebrate when they're done? Like I don't know. Give us a little behind the curtains.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. There was this very pesky thing I'm not sure that you remember three years ago, this global pandemic. It really allowed us to take a look at every aspect of going on an event, on a trip, and we did. We went into the hard parts of the data and the exciting part is one we're having our banner year. This is the best year we've ever had pre-COVID, and so people are coming back to this world Some great stats to know as a church.
Speaker 1:So if I'm that missions pastor, I'm that person leading this side of things. The average church does seven missions trips a year. So at least something that would qualify. We would consider a missions trip, something domestic as well. So if we're in New York and we're going to help a relief in a fire or something down in Florida because of a hurricane, we would still call that missions. But we see on average seven mission strips. The average attendance on those is 11 people. That fluctuates between 11 and 14 on average, and so you usually have one or two leaders leading those 14 people. And then the average fundraise that we see around that is between $2,200 and $2,400. And so if you're doing that- Like per person or per trip Per person?
Speaker 1:Is that per person? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that should include your flight, that should include some sort of level of insurance and then your lodging of the individuals there. Sometimes people have different budgets for food or host homes or things of that nature, and so that can drive prices up or down. But on average, we're seeing a fundraise, if you will as a church, around $25,000 per event, and so as you start to budget and start to see things come together, that's really helpful to know. Are we overspending, are we underspending, is there opportunity for better flight rates and things of that nature. But yeah, those 11 to 14 people seem to be a manageable group.
Speaker 1:Plus you've got that camaraderie, and one part that a lot of organizations aren't as adept with is we've accomplished the goal. We come home and we just try and get them to do it again, and the big part is actually the relationship that you can now establish throughout the rest of the year as that missional program or that events-based program. We've just had this bonding time. Frank and Jared have just built something or gone somewhere or have this sort of thing, and I just go all right, bud, we'll see you next year. That's really an opportunity for greater pastoring. That's helping them plan the next different events.
Speaker 1:A lot of times we'll have training classes for the returning of possibly what we've seen there culturally different spiritual impacts that we've had during those times. So as much as the front end of a missions trip or a heavy travel trip is administrative based, the return or the back end of the trip could really be spiritual growth and the fact that together I as the spiritual lead of that trip, if I'm leading it that way, or the house of worship that I'm a part of I now have a tremendous amount of heart, social equities, connection to this place and I of course would want other people to go and experience what I've seen, but bringing them as part of the next team or helping them shape the next event, the next missions trip. A lot of churches do forget about that part. It's thanks so much.
Speaker 2:Let's start fundraising for next year, but there's just a massive community that can absolutely grow as a result of people you know. But oftentimes you probably went with some people you didn't know and so now you know more people, you have more connection in the church. Like there's a lot of byproduct goodness that comes from people going on a mission trip. That's like not necessarily directly tied to the work they did on the mission trip. Like all those relationships and connections and even if you did it with your church, like now you're even that much more connected, kind of connected to your church, like you have an extra. You have this extra thing that bonds you to that community of people and your church, you know. So it's like it's super powerful and you see it with kids going like kids going on mission trips and doing youth cores and youth camps and all that kind of stuff. Like all of that is like has a similar effect on people.
Speaker 1:We saw it in our family through kingdom Builders. When you're talking about young folks going to a local city together, meeting other families, creating those relationships, I have a story. Actually my sister out of Richmond she did Kingdom Builders with her kids established a relationship with a family there. They became friends and, lo and behold, it was time they felt called to start a church and out of that church came the school. Well, the woman who runs that school came right out of that missions program and those times that they spent together in Kingdom Builders together and they would have never had that relationship is one side of it.
Speaker 1:And then we often talk about, especially in the missions world we don't want to be the neon shirts that are painting the school for the 10th time and you hear all those sorts of John Crist-like jokes which absolutely are part of that industry. If you will, what we really really are is getting probably more from the locations than we potentially could even give. Yes, we're there as a representation of Christ. Yes, we're there as a part of what? Can we now support you over this time in between events and seeing continued fundraising for the event? Yes, of course we have that $2,200 to $2,500 that we have to raise per individual or that $25,000, $30,000 per event as a church.
Speaker 1:But how can we take that ministry, partner alongside of them? Yes, they know maybe we're coming twice a year with these different groups, but establishing these connections, that aren't we're here to help you and this and that, but we're here to partner alongside with this organization and the impacts that we see stateside become those opportunities for more community and greater process. And so there's different articles that we have in terms of best ways and best practices. We even partner with an organization called Standards of Excellence, helping you cover all your bases prior to getting to an event, cover all your bases prior to getting to an event. And then really, the big, the big, the biggest followup aspect of that is what are we doing now that we've returned? What, what, what spiritual impact have we had and how can we insulate community around that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, how many missions trips do you think you guys will do this year, like how many missions will run through your software?
Speaker 1:A right around between 14 and 15,000 is the expectation this year, so we're right on track. It's a lot. So the I mean coming out of COVID, we were just absolutely I joke with our business partners. I now know what it felt like to be on the stock floor of the Great Depression. It was literally that day.
Speaker 2:It never stopped. Our mission trips all stopped completely.
Speaker 1:It stopped for 24 months. It really really did, and there was a cultural concern there where, even as we're starting to kind of peek out of the hole, the last thing you want is your faith-based organization going to somewhere and creating potentially another outbreak or greater contaminant. I mean, we were the last organizations to start traveling again, and so we were blessed to have weathered that season. But that was such a reformation on why do we do what we do One as a software and as a business, why do we do what we do? But really, the capital C church of we have been really put aside and told to stay home for a 12 to 24-month period.
Speaker 1:Now that there's permission and the ability to do so, that's really what comes as a result of having our banner year. There is this pent-up opportunity. There's this man we haven't seen you guys in upwards of three years. How can we help? How can we come back? And so we're seeing increased communication between missionaries saying, hey, we had COVID in our village. This is ways that you can better support us and how you can guide us, and then, as you come in, here are some sensitive and cultural ways that you can really make an impact that again we joke about you're painting the school. We want to be more than school painters and we really want to be able to establish relationship and be able to take away more than we, or an equal takeaway as much as we give.
Speaker 2:Yeah, love it. Man. How do folks get to know more about you guys? Yeah, so let's make sure you guys do 15,000 trips this year.
Speaker 1:Oh, that would be incredible and we'll see you guys. Definitely we're going to be attending Modern Church Leader your conference coming up, I'm very excited.
Speaker 2:If you haven't registered, make sure you register, y'all.
Speaker 1:Get in there, I'll be standing at a booth there. We've got some promotions specifically for Tithely Churches that we're going to be releasing at that conference. Oh cool, we've got just ways to make sure that you guys experience what we're talking about and get the blessing of that. And then you would go to acstcom slash go. So we had a partnership there with ACS. Technologies is an organization out of South Carolina and they are kind of our parent company in this process and so we come alongside them. They've been able to increase our customer service and our trainings and things of that nature. If you're ever on the phone with someone from ACS, you're going to hear a sweet Southern drawl, which is good when you're talking with churches and doing all the instructions and the customer service side of things. And then we're building more and growing our technology and you can one see a 30-day trial of that If you go to acstechnologiescom slash go. That's just 30 days for you to get a feel for it and then come October we're going to have some promotions for you guys.
Speaker 2:Love it, man. Well, thanks for coming on the show. Love the product, Love what you guys are doing. Like 15,000 mission trips, no-transcript. Yeah, we'll be there. Awesome man. Well, thanks for joining everyone. Another great show. Join us next week on another episode and we'll catch you later. Bye-bye.