the Tools we use
INFRASTRUCTURE
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Akamai is a CDN we use for digital content storage.
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud hosting platform. We use AWS to host our non-SaaS solutions.
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Azure is a Microsoft cloud computing platform that we use to host Rock, our church database and RMS.
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Cloudflare provides cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and other helpful security features. We use their DNS services.
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Cloudways provides cloud storage solutions. We use this for hosting simple websites.
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Fivetran is a data movement tool that helps us get data from one application over into another. We use this to move data into Tableau for reporting.
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GoDaddy is a domain registrar and DNS service.
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Hover is our preferred domain registrar and DNS service.
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Lens allows us to run and manage kubernetes instances.
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New Relic monitors our applications and provides performance information.
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Sentry provides application performance monitoring.
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101Domain is a domain registrar and DNS service.
Website and app services
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AddEvent creates shareable events and event listings that users can then add to their own calendars. We use it for “Add to Calendar” actions in our emails. We also use the AddEvent API to power our “Add to Calendar” buttons on our custom-built church sites.
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Adobe provides bulk licensing for their entire font library in Adobe Fonts. Partner font foundries also make their fonts available for licensing through Adobe Fonts.
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Our custom-built church sites use Algolia to power their internal site search. Algolia is a search-as-a-service platform that provides high quality and relevant search results.
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CrazyEgg provides a window into how users are interacting with your website through heatmaps, clickmaps, and more.
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It never hurts to keep an eye out for broken links on your website, and Dr. Link Check is a free tool that will crawl your website and look for broken links.
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FontAwesome is an icon library. Using its CDN you can reference their icons in your CSS and HTML, or you can download icons to use in designs and graphics for apps and websites.
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Google Analytics is a web analytics service that tracks and provides reports on website and app usage, from views and users to device type, geography, and more.
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In conjunction with Google Analytics, we will often add UTMs to our links in emails, apps, and sms text messages to track and report on their usage.
(UTM is short for Urchin Tracking Manager, a relic from the company Urchin that Google acquired to create Google Analytics — fun fact!)
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PushPay offers a wide variety of church-specific services including giving, church management, and digital services. We use PushPay for our online giving, and in 2022 we used the PushPay app platform for the Drive Conference app.
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The Shareaholic Share API is what powers the social sharing buttons on our church sites. Shareaholic has a suite of audience engagement tools.
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Shopify is an ecommerce platform that has a wide range of selling features. We have used Shopify to sell merch for our Be Rich, FOR Gwinnett, and FOR Atlanta brands.
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Squarespace is a website building platform that offers flexible drag-and-drop builder functionality and easy-to-use templates. We use Squarespace for most of our ministry and campaign websites. Some examples:
Note that our church sites are built on a custom CMS that we built ourselves. They are not Squarespace.
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Subsplash offers comprehensive church-specific digital services including church management, giving, website, and app features. We use the Subsplash app service to power our church apps.
Communications
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Bitly is primarily a URL-shortener, but its subscription packages include QR codes, analytics, and more.
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Litmus is an email building and testing platform. We use Litmus to test our emails before sending them to ensure they meet our design standards in every email client.
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Mailchimp features a suite of digital communications products, but it’s best known for its email marketing. We use Mailchimp to send all our marketing and promotional emails.
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MotionMail generates countdown timers that you can embed in an email.
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QR Code Generator is a free QR code building tool. It’s pro package offers dynamic QR codes, more customizing options and better analytics.
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Simpletexting is a text message marketing platform. We use Simpletexting to send reminder texts, daily devotionals, and event updates.
Design/UX
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Adobe Illustrator is a vector-based design software. We use this for creating logos and web graphics.
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Adobe Photoshop is a pixel-based design platform we use to edit photography and create digital graphics.
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This app comes native to Mac desktop devices. Its color picker allows you to select the hex code from any pixel on any screen and in any app or window.
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ImageOptim compresses and removes unnecessary metadata from graphics and images to optimize them for web usage.
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Figma is a collaborative web application for user interface design. We’ve used its prototyping tools to demo user interactions, especially during the process of building our custom church sites.
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Sketch is a Mac app and collaborative tool used to design interfaces. We used Sketch for creating pre-build mockups of our church sites before development.
Forms and registrations
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Eventbrite is an event management and ticket sales platform. When an event needs a waitlist, cancellations/refunds, or check-in, we will often use Eventbrite for its registration.
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eSpace is a church facility management software. It’s used by our Facilities team to manage room and resource registrations within the building.
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Formstack features drag-and-drop form building, notification and confirmation emails, custom embeds, third-party integrations, and more. We use Formstack for a large portion of our online forms.
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ServiceReef is software built for churches to manage service project and mission trip registrations. We use ServiceReef for our mission trip applications.
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We have used SurveyMonkey to collect and analyze attendee feedback.
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Typeform cleverly builds online forms and surveys with a dynamic user interface. We use Typeform for some of our internal forms.
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VolunteerHub is a volunteer management and recruitment platform. We use VolunteerHub to allow attendees to sign up for service projects, especially during Be Rich.
CRM
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Rock is an open-source customer relationship management system. We use Rock as our source of truth for people data.
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Synthesia is a platform that creates AI-generated videos featuring digital avatar speaking with a synthesized voiceover. We use this in conjunction with Chat GPT to create digital training videos.
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Mailgun is a subscription email service integrated with our CRM (Rock). It allows us to send emails directly from Rock and provides useful statistics (open rate, click rate, soft/hard bounces, send failures) back to Rock.
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We use Twilio to enable sending and receiving text messages in Rock using its web service API.
project Management
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Basecamp is a project management platform that offers note taking, task assignments and reminders, internal communication, and document storage. We collaborate with our ministry counterparts through Basecamp on large-scale projects.
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Jira is a platform that helps teams collaborate to track development tasks within a body of work. We used Jira to track user stories and bug fixes during our agile custom church site development project.
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Planyway is a project planning product that, in conjunction with our Trello account, allows us to visualize timelines and roadmaps and allocate our development resources.
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Trello is a kanban-style task managing platform. We use Trello to collaborate with and assign tasks to our external vendors.
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Whimsical is a communications and collaboration hub. We use Whimsical as a centralized location for product documentation including technical requirements, flowcharts, client meeting notes, and product overviews.
Team Tools
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The Bitmoji integration for Slack allows us to create and share avatars of ourselves. It’s used for lighthearted humor, birthday celebrations, and really any time you want to high five but aren’t in person.
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Cyberduck is an application that allows for quick and easy server access. We use Cyberduck to FTP to our file servers.
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Because shared documents shouldn’t live on one person’s computer, Dropbox offers a wide assortment of cloud file storage and collaboration options.
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The Giphy integration for Slack helps improve our team morale by providing an enormous catalog of animated gifs to share.
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The Google suite of digital products, including Google Drive, Google Sheets, and Google Docs, offers collaborative file management.
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Slack is our team chat. It’s the central communications hub for our team and our whole organization. Channels allow for topic-based discussion, while threads allow for collaborative tangents and general tomfoolery. We are a little obsessed with Slack.
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TextExpander is a keyword shortcut app. Use it to create short keywords that automate repetitive tasks for productivity and efficiency. We find new ways every day to use it!
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Toggl is a time-tracking tool. We use Toggl to track billable hours for contractors and also to track hours worked on projects.
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Zapier is an integration and automation tool that allows us to connect and transfer data between two or more SaaS platforms with minimal setup.
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Zendesk is a customer service solution that offers a help desk experience, from live customer support and requests to guides and how-tos. We use Zendesk as an internal system for our ministries to use to request our services.
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Zight is a cloud-based screenshot and screen recording tool. When you take a screenshot, it will automatically copy a share link to your clipboard for easy distribution. You can also annotate screenshots and create screen recordings that are quick and easy to share.
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Zoom is a video conferencing platform. We use Zoom for all of our remote work meetings and collaborations.
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1Password is a password management service. Using 1Password has allowed us to share groups of passwords internally and with outside vendors on an as-needed basis.
Multimedia Management
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OmnyStudio is an enterprise podcasting solution. All of our podcasts are hosted and distributed through OmnyStudio.
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Sardius provides media distribution through live streaming and on-demand video. We use Sardius for our live streams and on-demand message videos on our custom church websites and apps.
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Simplecast is a podcast hosting and management platform offering, among other things, distribution and analytics.
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Vimeo is a simple video storage and distribution platform. We use Vimeo to host a lot of the non-sermon video content we embed on our custom church sites and other ministry sites.