Celebrating 200 years in 2020, their database was understandably filled with some records that needed a new home (like Sunday School attendance records from 2001…).
Something important for CCE during 2020/21’s COVID pandemic was having accurate information for people in the downtown community to stay in touch, especially while things were primarily virtual. CCE is an historic site and people love the church. CCE wanted to stay in touch via newsletters and emails when people weren’t able to meet in person, and wanted to get the word out about the bicentennial.
“People love the place,” said Rose Cuddy, who is the Administrative and Data Coordinator at Christ Church Episcopal. “There was a lot of stuff that had cluttered up the old database. So one of the things we wanted to do for the bicentennial was reach out to everyone who considered Christ Church their spiritual home. At that point we started looking at the database and starting to try to clean things up: Is this [person] in the right membership category, do they have the correct email, etc.”
This all requires having an accurate database. “Evaluate what you have, decide what’s really important, and pitch the rest,” Rose said.
When COVID required a mass lockdown back in 2020, it gave Rose and her colleagues the opportunity to work from home and dive deep into the age-old records.
CCE’s success with Elvanto comes down to three main points.
Operating in a multigenerational church means some members are privy to new tech, while other members need hands-on training over a period of time before they fully grasp the power of new tech.
During COVID, Rose and her team all learned quickly how to effectively operate and communicate across virtual platforms like Zoom. Alongside that, Elvanto gave them the power to work together seamlessly on data migration and database improvements, all from their own virtual offices.
CCE has a lot of data. That’s what happens when you’re around for 200 years and have 4,000 members. With Elvanto and the Tithe.ly team, CCE’s data migration was seamless. "I will give one big shoutout to Jason in Data Migration,” Rose said after our conversation together. “He did a fabulous job with the amount of data we had and the custom fields that we wanted to input. I will say that the Tithe.ly team has been incredibly supportive so we truly appreciate that."
Having a dedicated contact for all your data systems needs is important because data can get heavy and complicated.
Whether it was the virtual training sessions, the back-and-forth emails, or the phone/video calls, Rose and CCE found their connection with Tithe.ly reassuring and helpful through their large data migration and overhaul. Having a great support team helps you decide what is uniquely important for your church throughout this process.
Now, with Elvanto, Christ Church Episcopal has the seamless ability to integrate church management with pastoral care, volunteer planning, administration, and more. Before their migration, CCE had a database with 27 years of data. Moving forward, they’ll have an accurate and refreshed database, making it easier to plan VBS, garden tours, historic site walkthroughs, church outreach, and more.
It all starts with accurate data. After that, the sky's the limit!
