Ryan, I am so sorry for not seeing your comment earlier. If you still have an interest in talking, you can reach me at ddrinnon@second.org.

Thanks Dan. This is good to know. As you and I both know...the word \'integration\' can mean lots of things. Some have even used that term to described manual exporting and importing....hardly an integration. Thanks for visiting the blog!

Michelle, I chose to review the top 3 solutions that hold the most market share. I may be wrong on my info since some of these companies don\'t report any official numbers. If I understand correctly, the companies that have the most customers (in order) are ACS, Shelby & Active Faith. There are other solutions for churches, CCB being one of them. I just chose to write about the top 3.

Flipboard is nice. Love the UX. I ran both for awhile.

Thanks Paul for feedback. We used the term \'shootout\' loosely. No winners or losers. I know all of these guys are in it for the Kingdom. It is a blessing for churches to have options. I am glad your church found the right solution. It makes a world of difference!

Thanks Ben for checking out the blog. I am glad it was helpful.

Thanks Susan!

Well, the Worship Center is the one place where staff have zero visibility in who is attending (from a systems standpoint). Unless a person drops a check in the offering plate or checks a child into the nursery, attendance by name really is impossible to track at any large scale.

The value in knowing who is in worship is valuable at several points:

1. Allows pastoral leadership to recognize faithful members as a candidate pool for leadership positions in the church.

2. Allows pastoral leadership to know percentage of visitors and members...and even if a visitor\\\'s name is not known (just the number of times their face have been identified by the system...this helps staff understand visitor trends. Are they leaving after only one visit? How many times does someone visit before they join.

3. If specific members begin to miss worship, this could spark some type of pastoral care response and hence narrow the back door of the church.

All of this aside, there is one issue I haven\\\'t really addressed and that is the \\\"big brother\\\" affect. As a pastor and a techie...the idea intrigues me, but I don\\\'t think the watchful eyes of video cameras would go over well in most congregations. It certainly would give me great pause.

But in reference to security, we do have security cameras but not facial recognition tied to our membership system.

No, it sounds like a great idea, but it is way too expensive and would require quite a bit of effort to integrate the photos in the facial recognition systems with photos in our church membership system.

I would be interested to hear of any other useful apps you use. Always looking for something that meets a need!