All are called to serve.

We all have a place where we can serve. Indian Creek Community Church is where I serve. Some time ago, Jason Wilson, the Director of IT for ICCC, asked if I would be willing to help with some reporting needs. See, the church has an amazing infrastructure. With large number of volunteers, the church has utilized technology in amazing ways to drive their mission forward. From the fully-equipped video and audio production studio to the web-managed HVAC system, this organization has truly embraced the digital age, using it to create authentic, personal, and life-changing relationships and experiences. Utilizing predominantly Microsoft technology, with dedicated servers running MSSQL 2005, Exchange 2003, Great Plains / Dynamics, CRM, and much more, the church leadership is able to gather and report on an amazing amount of demographics information. This information, in turn, is used to better minister to the various demographic constituencies in attendance. Unfortunately, there was one huge piece missing.

Attendance

I have been impressed with how professional David has been and his expertise to bring about the best solution for our needs as well as his ability to present creative solution paths. I highly recommend Stanley Communications for your business needs.

Jason Wilson, IT Director, ICCC

With the amazing capabilities that the church had, they were reduced to entering the service headcounts into Excel spreadsheets and then emailing the charts around. Not a very elegant solution. Over lunch one day, Jason and I discussed his vision for a web application that would allow a staff member to enter headcounts into a form, have the data saved to a database, and then reports presented based on that data.

I created a custom database in MSSQL 2005 to hold the different fields that they wished to capture, and then, using ASP.net 3.5 with some nifty AJAX effects, created a web form for them to enter their data. Once we validated that this tool worked, I began creating reports for the leadership to use.

Still in progress…

We are still finding ways to extend this application. Currently, we are converting stand-alone .rdl reports into web-ready .rdlc reports to leverage all of the different systems. As we move forward, we will include another web application to capture even more data.

Projects like this one are the reason that I am in this business. Being able to take another person’s vision, put it into action, and see quantifiable results is very satisfying. Being able to contribute to a mission as important as ICCC’s is quite humbling. It’s also fun.