Ministry Brands: Amplifying Ambition

View This Article in BOSS Magazine

Strengthening purpose-driven churches, nonprofits, and private businesses translates into high achievement for Ministry Brands

Helping purpose-based organizations thrive in the digital age is the pride and passion of Ministry Brands. Over 90,000 faith-based, nonprofit groups and private sector institutions across North America turn to the Knoxville-based SaaS developer to support their administration, giving management, accounting, and member engagement needs. These organizations, tasked with managing roughly 10 million members and the donations they represent, get a powerful technology assist that enables them to efficiently process more than $6 billion in donations and nearly 2 million background checks annually.

The company’s organizational management solutions for Faith Based Organizations, nonprofits, and businesses in hospitality, transportation, education, and healthcare include financial management modules, website management, mobile apps, and event streaming, all designed to make doing business easier and more efficient while increasing the amount of time staffers and leaders can spend doing the important work of creating a positive impact on the world.

Within their four business lines, Ministry Brands offers a range of innovations through their family of software and service solutions, including Ministry Brands Amplify™, a new end-to-end church management system; ParishSOFT a comprehensive management software for Catholic parishes and dioceses; DonorDirect a CRM for large and mid-size nonprofits, and its various employee and volunteer background screening solutions such as Protect My Ministry for churches and Shield Screening for private sector companies.

At the end of 2021, New York’s Reverence Capital Partners made a majority investment in Ministry Brands, kickstarting a renaissance for the 10-year-old firm. In December 2022, the company appointed Christian Greyenbuhl as Chief Financial Officer. Greyenbuhl, previously of PwC, ADP, and Xplor Technologies, is part of the organization’s refreshed leadership team, which last year also saw the addition of new senior leadership across other key parts of the organization as part of a re-shift in the go-to-market strategy and an emphasis on innovation.

“We are committed to raising the standard in the markets we serve. New, fresh ideas and fresh faces are bringing a new way of thinking to the organization,” he told BOSS. One such redirect is shifting focus from providing software enabled by service as opposed to service enabled by software. “That's a bit of a different mentality and focus on things. We realize that our customers need a total solution that's beyond just the technology to get the greatest benefit from their relationship with us.”

Ministry Brands is achieving that goal by investing heavily in an entirely new tech stack to better support customers, expedite new product development, and gain additional insight into finance and operations. Most recently, they’ve completed a holistic service model transformation aimed at enhancing the way that they deliver implementation, tech support, and ongoing success coaching for their clients.

“We also provide our customers with training and support to help them maximize the benefits of the solutions that are available to them. We place a great deal of value on data and the insights it can bring us and our customers which is why we measure our success with KPIs like average call handle times while also paying particular attention to NPS, CSAT scores, and valuable customer comments in NPS surveys,” he explained.

Ministry Brands Amplify, the company’s latest solution that was launched in February, is a next-generation end-to-end church management ecosystem designed for the post-COVID world. According to the CFO, the release is Ministry Brands’ most significant product launch in a decade. “When we built it, we really listened to our clients. We conducted interviews and surveys with clients and the market and undertook extensive research to understand how our customers’ needs have evolved post-COVID.”

With weekly in-person church attendance down, difficulty getting volunteers, and decreased giving – churches are facing challenges that are new. As a result, the pandemic has created a permanent, fundamental shift in how purpose-driven organizations operate and how they interact with their members.

These days, digital solutions offer a significant advantage for churches wishing to broaden their outreach or perhaps reduce their risk and maximize their efficiency by having less physical cash; the ability to access real-time insights into their financial health is critical, and so is visibility around engagement issues. “If you think about individuals at parishes or their individual churches, often a pastor would have a weekly interaction with those individuals and know everybody by face and by name,” he stressed.

“That’s no longer common, especially for groups serving large geographic areas and virtual communities. The challenge facing most of these groups is how to reach and engage with members and find ways to encourage community participation and make secure donations in a more efficient way. Church staffs can’t afford to spend as much time on administrative functions,” he added.

“That was our intent in launching Ministry Brands Amplify, a specific solution geared towards those new needs,” he emphasized. “As we progress with our launch, we ultimately plan to integrate more than a dozen functional modules into the platform and then we'll continue to push that innovation further in time.”

The heavy-duty partnership between Reverence Capital and the refreshed leadership team at Ministry Brands is translating into a more aggressive focus on the customer experience and investments in innovation. “We want to ensure that we unify those internal teams, break down the silos from the past, and look forward together to a brighter future.”

In March, the company announced the relaunch of its popular ShareFaith Media Marketplace content library, which arms administrators and leaders with worship content, graphics, videos, social content, curriculum, and print materials to make messaging more dynamic and easier to deliver.

Greyenbuhl also mentioned that Ministry Brands is launching a new R&D facility in Q2 of this year. “We can’t disclose details yet, but we are close to announcing a significant investment in Europe that will be dedicated to accelerating our product innovation and development.”

The organization’s organic growth is supplemented by a strong history of M&A activity. As Greyenbuhl noted, “We're committed to driving that organic growth through product and service innovation, but it's about observing a market which often requires quite creative and ingenious ways of servicing customers.” When seeking acquisitions, many opportunities come from outside the faith-based solutions arena in an effort to bring industry leading technology to nonprofits and faith-based organizations.

“We are always on the lookout for those strategic opportunities that fit that customer need,” he said. “We want to find those best-in-class solutions that have been built for the private sector but bring them to faith-based nonprofit organizations because, ultimately, these clients still have a business to run.”

The company’s culture is geared towards creating an atmosphere where employees can make their passion actionable and make positive impacts around the world. Their trailblazing approach to growth allows excellent career and professional development, enabling people to do well by doing good.

“We're actively changing all the time,” Greyenbuhl said. “We are on an accelerated transformation journey to impact the world by providing new technology and services that enable purpose-driven organizations to grow, protect and engage the communities that they serve.”