Matthew Brown - It's All in "The Box"

It's All in "The Box"

By Matthew Brown

A funny thing happens to me from time to time: in spite of our Christian Living ad, and in spite of my sparkling disposition, people are sometimes not sure what I do or whether CorData is accepting new clients. First, let me assure you that we are definitely accepting new clients, and also be assured that the application process is frighteningly simple.

CorData serves businesses and Christian churches and ministries. For businesses, suffice it to say that we can manage your network and your web site, with great aplomb!

"The Box"-A Platform for Ministry

For churches and ministries, think of everything it takes to move a ministry forward. Leaders must find a way to track donations, to communicate with members and visitors, to maintain a web site that lets people know what the church is "about," to accept e-mails and much more. All of that requires an initial investment by the ministry and on-going investments for administration, management, repair and licensing costs. Those costs far exceed the money spent up front on hardware and software, and they pose a real problem for growing churches.

That is why I launched CorData Ministry Services in January, 2006. Our mission is to take the things we have learned in serving businesses and make them available for kingdom work. Our vision is to help your church or ministry-until it becomes quite large-to not need to invest in a major way in servers and software. We want to provide it all-membership management, online donations and tracking, streaming audio and video, event registration, broadcast e-mail, accounting and whatever-that-next-thing-is- within a simple monthly service plan that anyone can understand and almost any church can afford.

Even today, many of the services mentioned above are already in "The Box," our term for the services you receive with our monthly service fee. When we launched in 2006, we had the Member Manager, Web & Email Hosting, Streaming Audio/Video and the Virtual Rehearsal Room (a tool through which worship leaders can share upcoming songs with their band or orchestra). In the time since the launch of CorData Ministry Services, we have added Calendars, Photo Galleries, Leadership Profiles, a Content Management System, Contact Us tools and much more.

More Service-No More Price

"The Box" has grown a great deal, but the price has remained the same. And more is on the way. Actually, as I write this, we are hard at work on an Email Broadcast Tool and an Event Registration system, both of which will be integrated with our existing Member Manager, bringing our ministry partners another step closer to that single system for managing their ministry.

A Unique Vision

As part of our platform, we provide web site design and hosting services; in fact, it is the foundation of our plan. That said, many people confuse us with simple web hosting companies-and there are quite a few, even some geared toward Christian churches. What sets CorData apart is our approach. "The Box" keeps growing without a similar growth in the price. How did we do this? We accomplished it early on by acknowledging that when we wrote software-the actual guts of the system-we would only have to do it once.

What that means for our clients is that once someone-a client, CorData, a corporate partner-pays us to write or integrate some cool new feature into our system, we push it into "The Box." Then we only charge for the hosting of the software, the storage it requires and the transmission of that data (videos, audios, photos, etc.) across the Internet. In essence, "The Box" is the quickest and best way to gain access to the cool Internet tools you need for your ministry AND the best way to make sure you stay up on new tools as they develop, all without having to purchase a single server or install even one database! Be sure to check out "The Box."

Matthew Brown attends Liberty Church in Marietta, Georgia. He married way out of his league fifteen years ago, but his wife continues to fall for his shtick. Together they are blessed to be raising the four best children in the world.