Over the past year, it became clear that our church staff needed a better way to manage our projects and to lead teams of people when we are collaborating on something. As our church continues to grow, and as our staff continues to grow with it, having a project management system has become very important. After testing out different systems, I quickly realized that Asana was exactly what we needed.
Asana breaks things down into four levels: organizations, teams, projects, and tasks. Simply put, organizations are made up of teams, these teams work together on projects, and these projects have tasks. Your organization is your church. Your teams can be any team at your church (your staff, men’s ministry team, women’s ministry team, children’s ministry team, missions team, etc.). The projects can be anything you want them to be (putting together an event, preparing for a mission trip, organizing a conference, etc.). And the tasks are the things that must be completed in order for the project to be successful.
So, for example, let’s say that we have a men’s ministry team that is going to put together a men’s night at our church. Here is how that will look in Asana. The organization is our church. The team is our men’s ministry team. The project is our upcoming men’s night. And the tasks include everything that it will take to make this night successful (finding a speaker, booking a band, ordering food, preparing discussion questions for the small groups, purchasing door prizes, ordering t-shirts, promoting the event, etc.). And, each of these tasks can be assigned to different people on the team and given a due date, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks.
There are other benefits to using Asana as well. For example, even though you pay per user (your staff members will need a paid account), Asana gives you unlimited guest accounts for free (the members of your church can use the guest accounts). This is extremely helpful, because it allows you to invite as many people as you need to a team at no additional cost. In addition to that, Asana also has an app for your computer, an app for your phone, and they provide a 50% discount to churches through Techsoup.
If you don’t currently have a project management system, I would encourage you to look into Asana. So far, we have found it to be very helpful for our church.
To see what other systems I recommend for your church, please visit the Systems page at XPMinistry.com.
