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Worship Software Selection Guide: How To Use This Guide

How To Use This Guide:

The guide is written as a series of questions. Do NOT use the guide to simply pick the software with the most features! The first thing to do is to simply decide which features that your church needs. First look at each question and ask yourself to rate the question as "Not Applicable", "Nice" or "Critical". "Not Applicable" means that this question is of no relevance and should be ignored. "Nice" means that it might be a useful issue but is not very important." "Critical" means that it is an important item that must be met by this software.

Here is What To Do:

  1. First, download a trial version of one of the popular software titles such as EasyWorship, Songshow Plus, Presentation Manager, Sunday Plus, etc. just to try one out.
  2. Now that you have some experience, go through the questions in this list and rate their importance.
  3. Eliminate the questions from the list that are rated as "Non Applicable". This may allow you to greatly reduce the size of this exhaustive selection guide. Recreate the list with a smaller number of questions.
  4. Review questions rated as "Critical". Examine the software products with the list. If a software product doesn't meet your "Critical" rating then eliminate the software from consideration.
  5. Review the remaining software products that meet your "Critical" rating and see what "nice" features they have. Remember, all the software that remains meets your critical requirements. Just because a question has more "Nice"s however doesn't make them the best. Ease of use counts, and some "Nice" ratings are worth more to you than others.
  6. MOST IMPORTANT: Download a trial version of the software and try it out. Make a dry run of making up a sample worship service and see how it works for you.
  7. Talk to other users.

Here are some things to consider when looking at worship software packages:

Stewardship Issues: (Costs, Longevity, etc.)

Even though you may have a limited budget, be careful about making your decisions based on cost alone. Once you pick a software product and use it for a few months it can be a painful process to change to a different one. You may spend a lot of time training staff. You may also spend a lot of time "tuning" up the song list. If you decide to change to a different product later, you may find it extremely laborious to convert all your songs over to the new software. A lot of these products have incompatible databases. Change products and you may be starting over from the beginning. The bottom line is that you need to make your decision with care.