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What Cenetric Can Do for Kansas City-Area Churches

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What Cenetric Can Do for Kansas City-Area Churches

By David Stidham, Operations Manager at Cenetric

Cybersecurity risks. Reputational damage. Team burnout. Think we’re talking about businesses? Think again.

Churches and other places of worship experience the same technology pains as the other SMBs Cenetric helps, but we often see them “just dealing with” these challenges when they don’t have to. Managed or co-managed services for churches of all sizes is a valuable resource that lowers stress and keeps them running smoothly.

We’ve helped churches all over the KC metro with a variety of IT issues from planned server moves to frantic Easter Sunday distress calls. Whatever your challenges might be, we’ve probably seen (and fixed) it.

Saving Sunday online services

Every church wants online services to run smoothly for members who can’t make it to church in person. But one area church experienced a livestream outage (on Easter Sunday, no less), causing the sermon to go black moments before it began. Thanks to Cenetric’s Church Go Team, they were back on track in just five minutes. 

Cenetric’s live Sunday support agents quickly accessed the systems remotely to assess the issue and coach the onsite team on how to get the original stream back up. They also implemented the mobile backup plan they’d previously helped the church set up and started streaming the sermon through another device on a verified YouTube channel (created just in case something like this ever happened). 

Because the church had a plan and knew how to execute it by quickly engaging Cenetric, almost all of the members (more than 90%) stayed online and enjoyed the Easter sermon. 

Building a strong network

Maintaining a strong, stable network is sometimes a tall order as your church expands to multiple campuses — or even as it contracts. When Lenexa Baptist Church was ready to turn a few of its sites into autonomous churches, Cenetric was ready to help send them off with strong networks of their own. 

As LBC’s long-time partner, Cenetric migrated terabytes of data and dozens of assets to the new networks, setting them up for success as independent churches. Those same churches later called on us to help them as they acquired new campuses of their own, and LBC asked us to do the same when they brought in additional churches once again. 

Reaching across the globe

Speaking of multi-campus networks, Blue Valley Baptist Church was doing important work across campuses and across the world at mission sites. But with servers that were based on site in the main church building, working from anywhere but there was inefficient and clunky for their team, who had to remotely access the servers through a VPN. 

Cenetric saved the BVBC team a lot of frustration by transitioning the church network to web-based servers and moving to cloud-based device management and user authentication to eliminate the previous VPN. Cloud servers also meant the church would never need to worry about paying for costly new hardware, licensing, or installation fees related to physical servers again.

Staying safe from cyberattack

Every individual and organization needs to be mindful of cybersecurity best practices, and once again, churches and other places of worship are no exception. There are a number of best practices Cenetric works on with churches, including:

Unburdening church staff and volunteers

Sometimes a church staff member or volunteer who has some pretty good tech skills can become the unofficial IT team. And while that can be helpful, these team members can quickly get out of their depth when it comes to bigger IT issues. 

For one mid-sized church, volunteer burnout was becoming a big problem. The church offered a livestream with a group of volunteers running cameras, sound, streams and lighting. But this weekly event wasn’t the volunteers’ day jobs and they started to get burnt out managing it all each week. One Sunday, a volunteer made a mistake that cut the livestream, and the church’s leadership realized what a problem the setup had become. 

Cenetric helped the church leaders and volunteers by providing co-managed IT support and live remote guidance on Sundays, reorganizing tech gear, offering ongoing training as volunteers joined the team, and having weekly check-ins to review issues and prepare for the week ahead. Now volunteers can help their church without the burden of trying to be IT experts, and volunteer retention is up more than 80%.

Let Cenetric help your church focus on what it does best

We feel safe in saying that you didn’t become a church leader because you wanted to worry about networks, livestreams and cybersecurity. That’s what Cenetric is here for. We’re helping churches all over the Kansas City area with their tech challenges so they can get back to worship and parishioners and rest easy that the tech is taken care of.

Whatever IT staff your church has (or doesn’t have), Cenetric has a managed, co-managed or project-based solution for you. If you need responsive, expert IT services you can trust or have a unique technology challenge to tackle, let’s talk about it.