How ChMeetings Grew in 2023 and What’s Next in 2024
Happy New Year, everyone! The ChMeetings team hopes this New Year brings your wishes to life.
A new year is also an opportunity to reflect on everything we accomplished together last year and share our excitement for what comes next. Without further ado, here are our 2023 feature highlights and a look at the features we’ll be launching soon in 2024.
2023 Highlights
In 2023 we have brought various new features that enhance church activity in terms of communication, participation, online presence, contribution collection, and more.
NEW FEATURES
Automated Tasks
ChMeetings now lets you create automatic tasks such as messages for people’s birthdays or anniversaries, reminders, or follow-ups for new givers. You can set specific criteria based on which the task should trigger so that communications go out exactly when you need them to. You will no longer miss anything important by doing these tasks manually.
Organizational Contributions
Your church can not only collect donations from individuals but from organizations as well. You and your members can create and manage organizational contributors to more efficiently handle funds coming from such entities, on both sides.
Payment Refunds for Events and Online Giving
While it’s easy to organize paid events and collect contributions online, sometimes you might need to provide a refund for such transactions. In 2023, ChMeetings made this possible in both cases.
Volunteer Signup Sheets
The Volunteer Scheduler lets you assign volunteers to event-specific roles. The Volunteer Signup Sheet acts as an additional signup method where members can assign themselves to a date and a role. This lets them choose exactly how and when they can contribute to smoothly running church events.
Recurring Follow-Ups 
With recurring follow-ups, you no longer need to create another entry for situations when you may need to follow up again. Once an instance is completed, a new one will be created automatically until the recurrence period ends.
New Reports, Languages, and Communication Channels
There is a new Age Distribution Report showing a breakdown of your members’ age groups. Moreover, several reports have been enhanced with additional features (filtering, sorting, mobile availability, and more). Additionally, the Reports section has been reorganized.
The list of languages has also been constantly expanded. In 2023, we added Afrikaans, Traditional Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian (Bokmål). and Swedish.
IMPROVEMENTS
Contributions
This year we included the ability to integrate your external accounting apps with ChMeetings via Zapier, the option to cover online giving fees by default, shareable fund-specific donation links, and QR codes; as well as automatic ACH verification for online giving,
Improved Overall Experience
We made significant improvements in terms of user interface design, usability, clarity, and overall organization. Additionally, we added some features that are exclusively available for the Branded App and Diocese Accounts.
Other Improvements:
We enhanced people features, events, page builder, exports, permissions, calendars, forms, reports, API. and more.
Coming Up In 2024
2024 will be a very exciting year for the ChMeetings team and our community alike. We are working on valuable features that we hope will further improve your church activity and contribute to your mission.
Appointments
With the Appointments feature, you’ll be able to allow members and church teams to meet 1-on-1 for calls, face-to-face discussions, and more. You can configure appointment types, set up your working schedule, and configure how long each session can be. Members can easily book appointments via the app, and guests can do so using a public link that you can share anywhere online.
Service Planning
Plan your church services easily with specific service types and a song library that includes key signature management, tempo, tags, file uploads, lyrics, and more. You can start your worship plan from a template and easily download or share it with everyone.
Email Designer
Efficient communication is key to a tightly-knit church community. That is why ChMeetings is working to make it easier for you to create emails that please readers’ eyes and deliver messages effectively, both at the same time. The Email Designer will let you drag and drop elements to your email messages to quickly create layouts for your best communications.
Workflows
Workflows let you automate tedious tasks. For example, when someone joins your church, you can set up automation that sends all relevant communications to get the new person up and running with everything they need to know about your church.
Accounting
Soon you may not need to keep your accounting in another application, thus reducing your costs and workload. This feature will allow you to manage accounts, funds, transactions, or payees. You will also be able to manage budgets, import and export data, and run reports.
Online Store
Raising funds is crucial for the well-being of any church. This is where selling products or services to your community can significantly contribute to your financial stability.
Summer Camps
If your church organizes summer camps for the kids in your community, then your work is about to become much easier. We are working on a feature that lets you organize summer camps along with all the necessary details such as staying periods, food plans, before and after care, discounts, and more.
____
We are grateful for your contribution to our growth and are continuously working towards improving ChMeetings and making it as flexible as possible so that we can meet as many of your needs as we can. If you have questions, suggestions, or any feedback for us, please get in touch with us any time.
