Because they provide many different services to their communities, churches face a tough combination of facility management challenges. Everything from office space to public venues, from shelters to soup kitchens.
But even though there are many different challenges, there’s only one answer: work order forms backed by modern work order software.
What makes churches unique is the variety of facility and maintenance management challenges they have to overcome. In fact, because they provide many different services, they face a combination of problems from many different industries.
For churches, it can be the toughest of all possible worlds.
Concert hall, wedding venue, and meeting space
On top of the traditional Sunday service, churches also act as venues for everything from weddings to AA meetings.
They need to look after seating, both fixed and movable, stage and spot lighting, and PA systems, including everything from microphones to amps and speakers. All on the same day, they might be hosting hundreds of guests celebrating a wedding in the main hall and then a smaller group working their way through a 12-step program in a room in the basement.
Food banks: both warehouse and front-line models
Churches have a long tradition of feeding the less fortunate.
Some churches use the warehouse model, where they mainly collect and store food they then send to front-line operations. Just like the rest of the warehouse industry, churches deal with everything from leaky roofs to broken-down forklifts.
But other churches run their own front-line operations, including soup kitchens and food pantries, where they’re working directly with families struggling with food insecurity. Here, churches need to keep industrial kitchens both functional and clean. They need to look after deep fryers, ice machines, fridges, grills, and ranges.
Homeless and women’s shelters
In many cases, churches’ front-line operations provide more than food, and ensuring their shelters are safe and secure requires more than compassion.
Just like with for-profit hotels, churches need to follow all local and federal regulations for cleanliness and safety. They have to look after HVAC, plumbing, and electricity, and fire suppression systems need to be up to code.
Office space
All these different programs need people to run them, and those people need office space. Depending on the size of the church, there could be anything from a single office to a large combination of offices, boardrooms, a kitchen, and a cafeteria-sized lunch room.
But churches also face their own specific challenges
For all the challenges they share with other industries, churches struggle with a few that are all their own. And the nature of these additional burdens make all the other ones harder to tackle.
Dedicated, often unskilled volunteers
For many churches, volunteers can represent a large part of their workforce. The person running the soup kitchen might have professional experience in the industry, but much of the staff, the ones peeling potatoes and washing dishes in the back, are there out of the goodness of their hearts.
It’s the same with any service the church provides: volunteers might do a lot of the work, and that means there are often workers with more desire to help than helpful skills and experience.
Unpredictable funding
When a large percentage of your budget comes directly from the donation plate, you need to budget carefully and conservatively. Even if there’s ever any extra money to work with, you can’t depend in it being there next quarter.
Churches need to find dependable ways to get the most out of every donated dollar.
Work order forms backed by a CMMS make your life easier
If you’re still trying to look after your church’s maintenance with paper or spreadsheets, you already know all about the frustration of lost information and missed opportunities.
A modern CMMS makes your life easier by allowing you to move everything up to the cloud, where your data is safe, secure, and always accessible. But that’s just the start; with the right combination of features, you also get reliable workflows that save you money, even when you’re working with volunteers. 
With traditional maintenance management systems, it’s impossible to get enough information into work orders. With paper, there’s only ever so much you can scribble onto a sheet. And with spreadsheets, the formatting makes it tough to read even the simplest instructions.
Modern CMMS work orders come packed with everything volunteers need to understand tasks and work effectively, including:
- Step-by-step instructions
- Customizable checklists
- Digital images
- Associated parts and materials
- Interactive site maps and floor plans
And of course you’re not always working with volunteers. But all the information you can include in work orders is just as helpful for professionals. In fact, using the software, your full-time maintenance team can access comprehensive maintenance and repair histories for all your assets, helping them troubleshoot issues.
In both cases, volunteers and professionals can do the work properly because you’re giving them exactly what they need to get it done.
And because they’re working more efficiently, everything costs you less in the long run.
Next steps
Ready to learn more about how work order software can help your place of worship?
Hippo’s here to help you get the solution that works best for you, including answering your questions about work order software, helping you book a live software demo, or even setting you up with a free trial.
Quick summary
Churches provide many different services to their communities, and that means they face a variety of maintenance challenges. You can have all the same issues as venues, industrial kitchens, and if you’re running a shelter, even hotels. On top of that, a lot of your workforce is made up of volunteers, making it harder to ensure you’re getting the right work done the right way. And because much of your funding might come from donations, you have to keep a close eye on spending. But just like all those other industries, the best solution for churches is modern work order software. By ensuring everyone is getting what they need to work efficiently, you save money in the long run.
