When I Realized I Needed Help

Caring for and supporting people through life’s high and low moments can be extremely rewarding – it can also be extremely overwhelming. In 2011, I was fresh out of college and had the opportunity, through a friend, to help start an employee care program at a large company based in Oklahoma City.

Some of my responsibilities included: 

• Sending baby baskets to employees who recently welcomed a new baby. 
• Delivering food to employees who had recently lost a loved-one.  
• Sending flowers and handwritten cards to employees recovering from surgery. 
• Connecting employees with counseling professionals and mental health services.
• Organizing and coordinating travel for couples interested in all-expense-paid marriage retreats, compliments of the company. 
• Assisting with gas cards and transportation for families traveling long distances for specific health complications and procedures. 

In short, my job was to create, brand and rollout new employee care resources for the entire company. Charged with caring for more than 1,200 employees, I sought inspiration for how to best serve their needs — and to head off my fear of someone falling through the cracks. The work I was doing looked so similar to how I saw church leaders caring for their congregants. I was essentially doing pastoral care in corporate America.

Identifying the Problem

With this revelation, I started reaching out to my friends who were providing pastoral care every day. I asked them how they managed to care for their large, diverse and active congregations – what systems and technologies they used, how they coordinated with their teams, and how they made sure everyone’s care needs were met. They had all developed their own solutions, though there were commonalities: 

• Some were able to use their church management software; some of these have note keeping functions, but none provided dedicated pastoral care options. 
• Other congregations were using a very common solution — the notorious pastoral care spreadsheet. Those who’ve endured this method know that spreadsheets were made for numbers, not people. 
• Still others were using dry-erase boards, word documents or other editable (and deletable) options, wiping away invaluable pastoral care data.

Even more were using notebooks, email threads, text, calendars or other half-measures to track follow-ups, ensure care tasks were handled, and sometimes build care histories. To be transparent, I was stunned. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t already a dedicated tool for one of the most vital functions of the church — caring for their people.

Building the Solution

After not finding a holistic solution, and seeing that others were in the same boat, I decided to build the solution we all needed. As I understood the situation, a full-featured pastoral care app was the answer. It needed to:

• Store important pastoral care notes, the sum of which could become valuable care histories
• Provide a system for follow-up
• Preserve important dates and events from peoples’ lives and remind teams of those crucial dates
• Allow teams to coordinate care to ensure no one falls through the cracks
• Help care providers collect and analyze data in a way that provides critical insight into their care ministries, and
• Provide leadership with a bird’s-eye view of their team’s activities.

After many years of research, exploration, gathering feedback from care teams, trial and error (any CareNotebook fans out there!?), and finally development, my brother and I released Notebird in 2020 — and it is changing how teams everywhere do pastoral care.

Notebird

Notebird is easy-to-use pastoral care software for church leaders and their teams. With Notebird, pastoral care teams can store Updates about visits with congregants, note important Milestones and set up recurring reminders, as well as set and assign Tasks to team members. Teams can sort congregants into customizable Groups and restrict access to information using Notebird’s flexible permission settings. Information appears on congregant profiles and also in a feed format so everyone on the team stays up to date. Finally, care teams can use Notebird’s Reports feature to assess their care data and gain important insight into the impact their work is having as a whole. Notebird supports faith-based organizations of all sizes, and team members of all technological capabilities.

Notebird also works alongside church management software and integrates with several of the most popular of these to save care teams time and help them provide better care to congregants. This means teams can sync their people databases, rather than input information in two separate systems. If you’re using a spreadsheet, we have a tool for importing that information as well. Check out our Integrations page to learn more.

For more information on Notebird’s features, visit Notebird.app. Our website doesn’t hold anything back, because we know that once people see Notebird, they immediately understand how it can change the way they do pastoral care. See all the details of our features and pricing without any roadblocks, or watch our demo video to get a preview. If you have questions, feel free to send us a message anytime through the website or by email at tdoe@notebird.app. You can even take Notebird for a test-drive with our 14-day free trial. 

We built Notebird specifically for the people who need it, because this is the app I needed when I was caring for my people. The app was designed to be intuitive for the day-to-day of pastoral care and easy-to-use for everyone on the team. Notebird allows pastoral care teams to succeed in supporting individuals on life's journey, ensuring no one falls through the cracks.  I hope Notebird can reinvent the way you and your team do pastoral care the way it did for me and for hundreds of other Notebird users.