We have run all the final numbers on 2007 and are happy to report the results of a very good year. This blog post also highlights some of our past year’s major accomplishments. Our customer count at the end of the year was 706 church partners. Of those current customers, 30 churches are on Outreach’s recent list of Top 100 Largest Churches in America. We are happy that in that list we can now count LifeChurch.tv (Edmond, OK), one of the most technologically advanced churches as a customer along with Phoenix First Assembly (Phoenix, AZ), New Birth Missionary Baptist (Lithonia, GA), Brooklyn Tabernacle (Brooklyn, NY) and Community Bible (San Antonio, TX). We also expanded into new countries and are now in a total of six (6) countries (US, Canada, United Kingdom, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand). We ended the year with 61 employees.
Our product, Fellowship One, made significant strides in 2007 including automatic address verification, new email functionality, a rapid data entry module for new households and contact cards, self-check-in capabilities, bulk uploading of individual and family pictures, as well as the start of an entirely new Groups module that will become the basis for many new features in 2008. We also began the development of a new Reports module that will allow our customers to write their own reports. The new Reports feature is scheduled to be available before Dynamic Church 08 in May.
We did not add as much functionality as we had hoped because we did a lot, and I mean a lot, of work improving the technical aspects of the system. We upgraded the entire application to .NET 2.0, implemented the latest version of MS SQL Server and deployed a 64-bit architecture, both hardware and software. These upgrades provide significant performance improvements across the board. In fact, the systems average render time is down to 0.2 of a second – that is a fast ping-pong ball coming at you! If you were not at my keynote speech at DC ’07, do not even attempt to understand that last comment.
We also invested significantly in building a new MVC application architecture. This new architecture provides us a great foundation for rapidly adding new functionality to the system. We can already see this paying off in the new capabilities we have recently developed. As the architecture matures, we should see even greater improvements in developer productivity.
We added some specific user experience enhancements that allow us to provide a better overall service. We now provide enhanced recorded videos for training purposes. We have divided these up into “chunks” so you can take training “as you need it” for individual parts of the application. This will save you time and help in knowledge retention. This also allows part-time staff and volunteers to take training whenever their schedules allow.
We have also added some things to help the broad overall customer experience. We launched Experience.FellowshipOne.com that helps build community among our customers’ staff members and allows you the customer to “vote” on desired new features. We also launched our RUGs (Regional Users’ Groups) to help encourage these communities on a more local level and hosted our first Users’ Conference with over 330 in attendance. This year’s conference is going to be even better as we roll out advanced and basic training tracks to offer something for everyone’s learning needs. We hired an experienced network support person whose primary job is working with customers to ensure that a customer’s Internet connectivity is not an issue for access to the system.
In Delivery Services, we modified our implementation methodology to improve the adoption of the application across the church pastoral and administrative staff. We understand what it takes to make a successful Fellowship One implementation and developed “best practices” that we incorporated into the system conversion process. We will continue improving these best practices as we begin to roll out process diagrams and recommended procedures to help you take advantage of all that Fellowship One has to offer.
To quote an old Frank Sinatra song, it was a very good year! But 2008 is going to be even better. Now that we have a critical mass of employees, we will be rolling out further enhancements to all areas of our solution offering. We are also making a concerted effort to better incorporate partners in an overall solution that provides added value to help you accomplish your mission of reaching a lost world and developing full-time followers of Christ. We want to be like BASF; we don’t do church, we make the church better
Grace to you,
jhook
CEO/President
Fellowship Technologies