Proposed introductory pricing stinks for small churches

I think your proposed special introductory pricing policy stinks! The larger the church, the larger the discount. While the smallest churches, who have the smallest budgets for things like multimedia, get no discount at all. "Wow. Thanks for the hand up Logos." (<-Sarcasm)

I think I will pass on Proclaim, since you apparently have no interest in really helping the smaller churches, who are the ones who could benefit most from the help.

[:(]

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Kevin A. Purcell

I think the whole subscription model itself is a poor idea unless they are going to be adding new content each month that justifies ongoing expenses. I don't know that they are not. Haven't heard.

By comparison, I paid $350 for my current solution which I'm not really happy with. We've used it for five years plus a $150 update making it $500 for 60 months of use. That means I paid less than $10/month and the longer I use it the cheaper it gets.

I'd rather pay once for a program and then if I want added content add a subscription based thing. If you also have subscriptions to services like ShareFaith or the new BlueFish TV subscription, you are potentially paying up to $100 a month for multimedia content and presentation solution. That's a lot of money for a church under 100 people.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/313150#Comment_313150

That's a lot of money for a church under 100 people.

And that is most of the churches in the United States. I can't remember the statistics, but my friend Ward Gasque was studying the demographics of churches in America and found that the majority of them (some staggeringly large percent) were under 75 people. Of course many of the ones that are large are REALLY REALLY large (mega churches), so if you're talking about percentage of churchgoers who attend a small church, it's lower. But just sheer percentage of small churches, it's big.

Mark Smith

I'll throw out a different perspective. Everyone is getting the same price for one year. I don't see any discount for anyone during that year. Seeing as this is new software and there undoubtedly more bugs to iron out, that seems fair.

After the first year everyone but the smallest churches pays more. Seems that Logos is trying to take the smaller church into account even though Logos' costs are the same for every church no matter the size. You may find fault with how little more the bigger churches are paying, but that is really another issue. As I recall, Logos is pitching this to smaller churches who don't have the people who can use a more complicated program. If so, most of the Proclaim users will pay $250 or less a year.

Second, the subscription model is because Logos is maintaining the servers to support Proclaim and allow collaboration on each service planned. That costs Logos money every week and they have to price this differently than single-user stand alone worship packages. Each church needs to decide if the features are worth the price, but there is a little more going on here than buying MediaShout or SongShowPlus and being done with it.

For us Proclaim is not the package even though I like the collaboration possibility and the 'signals' potential. Our decision is not about the money. Our church database program costs a lot more than this for annual support and updating costs, so I don't see $200 as onerous or unfair.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/313176#Comment_313176

Q: What’s the size of U.S. churches?

A: The median church in the U.S. has 75
regular participants in worship on Sunday mornings, according to the
National Congregations Study http://www.soc.duke.edu/natcong/
. Notice that researchers measured the median church size — the point
at which half the churches are smaller and half the churches are larger
— rather than the average (186 attenders reported by the USCLS survey http://www.uscongregations.org/charact-cong.htm
), which is larger due to the influence of very large churches. But
while the United States has a large number of very small churches, most
people attend larger churches. The National Congregations Study
estimated that the smaller churches draw only 11 percent of those who
attend worship. Meanwhile, 50 percent of churchgoers attended the
largest 10% of congregations (350 regular participants and up).

Want to know more? Check the websites for the National Congregations Study at http://www.soc.duke.edu/natcong/ The US Congregational Life Survey (USCLS) website has statistics about congregations by religious traditions at http://www.uscongregations.org/

Approximate Distribution of U.S. Protestant and Other Christian Churches by size

(excluding Catholic/Orthodox)

ATTENDANCE	# OF CHURCHES	WEEKLY WORSHIPERS	PERCENT
7-99	177,000	9 million	59%
100-499	105,000	25 million	35%
500-999	12,000	9 million	4%
1,000-1,999	6,000	8 million	2%
2,000-9,999	1,170	4 million	.4%
10,000-plus	40	.7 million	.01%
TOTALS	approx. 300,000	approx. 56 million	100%

Q: How many people go to church each Sunday?

A: For years, the Gallup Research Organization
has come up with a consistent figure — 40 percent of all Americans, or
roughly 118 million people, who said they attended worship on the
previous weekend. Recently, sociologists of religion have questioned
that figure, saying Americans tend to exaggerate how often they attend.
By actually counting the number of people who showed up at
representative sample of churches, two researchers, Kirk Hadaway and
Penny Marler found that only 20.4 percent of the population, or half
the Gallup figure, attended church each weekend.

Want to know more? For an excellent summary of
this research, read the May 6, 1998 article by C. Kirk Hadaway and P.L.
Marler Did You Really Go To Church This Week: Behind the Poll Data, in
The Christian Century, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=237. See also an article about their work on the church attendance gap at http://www.hirr.hartsem.edu/about/news_and_notes_ vol4no1.html

Q: How many denominational groups are there in the United States?

A: This is a very tough question, because it depends on how a
denomination is defined. There were 217 denominations listed in the
2006 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches. But there may well be
other groups that function as a denomination but do not regard
themselves as such. The single largest religious group in the United
States is the Roman Catholic Church, which had 67 million members in
2005. The Southern Baptist Convention, with 16 million members, was the
largest of the Protestant denominations. The United Methodist Church
was the second-largest Protestant denomination with 8 million members.
In third and fourth spots were the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints, known as the Mormon church, with 6 million member,
and the Church of God in Christ, a predominantly black Pentecostal
denomination, with 5.5 million members.

Want to know more? Go to the 2006 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches. The Yearbook costs $50 and may be ordered at: http://www.electronicchurch.org You can also find a listing of denominations and their websites at http://hirr.hartsem.edu/denom/homepages.html

Kevin Huntsinger

I also agree that the pricing model is a bit ridiculous. Medium to large sized churches will have little issue paying. But churches our size (we have 66 on a good day) will be extremely difficult to swallow this charge.

I think it needs to be looked at a bit more.

Graham Owen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/313250#Comment_313250

But churches our size (we have 66 on a good day) will be extremely difficult to swallow this charge.

I agree, I started looking at Proclaim early in the development cycle but could not see how the feature set would benefit us. There are typically only two of us involved in developing the projection requirements so we sort out the song element at our weekly worship team practice and I add any other elements that I need on Saturday evening. Any last minute changes are handled just before the service. The collaboration capabilities exceed our requirements.

We would also need to take into account that we meet in a community centre where we have no Internet access so everything has to be ready to go before we arrive. The lack of Internet at our worship site means a whole lot of other features are of no benefit to us and that we would still need to make sure that everything was sorted out the night before.

I think that Proclaim is designed with Churches of 1,000 plus members with on site Internet where a large team may need to be involved.

Rich DeRuiter

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/313250#Comment_313250

I also agree that the pricing model is a bit ridiculous. Medium to large sized churches will have little issue paying. But churches our size (we have 66 on a good day) will be extremely difficult to swallow this charge.

I think it needs to be looked at a bit more.

I also pastor a numerically small church (we're big in other ways [;)]).

We aren't considering Proclaim because of 2 factors, the cost (more than our current worship budget for the year), and the requirement to have the projection computer connected to the internet. Both issues are deal-breakers by themselves. Combined they make it impossible. Further, there is just one person (me) who makes the projection program each week, so the collaboration feature has no appeal for us.

But I'm not angry about it. I'm happy with the projection program we purchased (along with the projector via a denominational grant), that we have been using since 2003 We've paid for a couple of upgrades, and are using it without problems each Sunday.

Kevin A. Purcell

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/313266#Comment_313266

My biggest feat right now is this. Will an important bare minimum feature suddenly stop working and not work for months since it is requiring interacting with Logos servers. If you don't understand my fear realize that I just started having issues with my reading plan no longer syncing or even showing up on my iPhone. This used to work great, but about 6 months or so ago it stopped working if you ever accessed the reading plan from your computer. I did last week for the first time and now I'm bitten.

Will access to my videos or the ability to input Song Select just suddenly stop working? When it does will Logos say, "We'll have it fixed soon" and then months later not have it fixed.

Two years ago I never would have believed this possible. So, I'm really wanting to jump on board, but not sure I can trust it due to the centrality of Logos servers.

toughski

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/314442#Comment_314442

I am not really wanting to take this post off-topic, but I have stated numerous times that while LOGOS says they are thinking globally, their actions do not support it.

Statistics in the US be as they may, MOST world churches are small. Subscription pricing for Proclaim as it exists now would not be appropriate for most of the world.

Paul Golder

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/314442#Comment_314442

Will access to my videos or the ability to input Song Select just suddenly stop working?

Most assuredly, likely on Sunday morning when the servers are very busy. This happens with most, if not all web based applications at one time or another. Even Google, who at last report has more servers than any other company on earth.

Brodie Krause

I don't think this pricing model is that outrageous, and the attendance-based subscription model is becoming something of the norm for cloud-based church software. The introductory price is low enough that a single member or small group/sunday school class could support it if need be (just have to sell them on the idea and get them excited for the benefits), and then with a year's worth of services supported by Proclaim, I think either the argument for a larger budget or the proof that this type of product is unnecessary will become obvious.

Do other products do what Proclaim does? Absolutely. Are these other products cheaper? Some are, some aren't. But I'll say this, out of the many products I've evaluated, none were as easy to pick up and integrate into the service as Proclaim.