Behind the Scene Changes

As Pastor Stanton mentioned in his message in church on Sunday, May 31, we currently ask members to use several different platforms in order to participate in the ministries at First Lutheran.

In an effort to make signing up and registering for events and opportunities easier for everyone, and to bring giving history, signups and more all under one roof, we will be making some big changes to how we manage our membership data and our giving platform this summer. A few of the areas this will affect will be:

Membership: we’ll be migrating our membership roles from our current platform to our new platform sometime in June.
Website: as of right now we have no plans to change our website provider, but the look will change a bit as we integrate it with our new platform.
Church app: the new platform offers a church app, which we will be working on throughout the summer and hope to launch at First Fest this fall.
Giving: the platform we use for giving will be changing, and we’ll be asking members to switch their giving to this new platform later in 2026.
Signing up/registering: we will be ending our use of Signup Genius and will be transferring our sign ups to our new platform later in 2026.

These are just a few of the bigger changes to expect, but there are other features of this new platform that we’ll be looking into, at a later date.

Exactly what is this “new platform”? Well, we are hoping that won’t really matter… just like it didn’t really matter that our current platform is named IconCMO. We just want to be able to offer our members and guests tools for them to participate and do ministry. And we think this new platform will do that. But for full disclosure, we’ll name some names: we will be moving away from using IconCMO (our member database), Vanco (our online payment processor), and SignUp Genius (where most of our registration takes place) and are moving all this to one platform that members will know as Church Center. During beta testing we did with a handful of members, it rose to the top. Will it do everything we desire? Nope. But we do know it will be an improvement over our current method of using various platforms for various things.

We intend to make our migration with staff over the summer, and to start a scheduled rollout of features for members starting in the fall.