MSP has the ability to import and synchronize information from most popular church management software. This is the easiest method to use to import your volunteer information into MSP if you already have this information entered into a supported church management software. MSP currently supports integration with Servant Keeper®, ACS, Access ACS, Parish Data System™ (PDS), ParishSOFT®, Logos, PowerChurch, and more. If you use a church management program that is not currently supported, contact us to add a feature request for that program.
Note: with the exception of Access ACS, we are unable to sync with versions of databases that are maintained remotely/cloud-based by the management software provider.
Synchronization is a one-way process, meaning data from your management system is added into MSP, but there is no lasting connection and records are not updated again unless a sync is performed. The exception to this is Servant Keeper, which does maintain a constant two-way sync with MSP and changes made in MSP are pushed to Servant Keeper in real time, and vice-versa.
A video tutorial for this topic is also available.
To synchronize volunteers with an external church management database, or use your existing database to do the initial import of volunteers into MSP, choose “Synchronize volunteers with…” from the File menu at the top of MSP’s main screen. The first time you chose this option, you will be led through a wizard that will ask you which church management software you use, where your database is located, and which volunteers you’d like to import and keep synchronized. If you have difficulty locating your church management database files, contact us and we will help you find the needed files.
During the initial synchronization, you will be asked to select the ministries that you’d like to import from your church management software.
You will then be asked to link the ministries that you have selected inside your church management database to the ministries that you have created inside MSP,
so that there is no room for doubt as to which ministries in your church management software corresponds to which ministries inside MSP. (This step is necessary because the names of the ministries may not match up perfectly.) When your volunteers are imported, they will keep all the same ministry qualifications that they have inside your church management software. However, after the initial import, ministry qualifications are not updated when another synchronization is performed, so if you change ministry qualifications in your church management software, you must also change those qualifications inside MSP. MSP supports much more complex definitions of ministries than are supported by most church management software, so automatic linking is not possible.
Once you have done the initial import, your volunteers will appear inside of MSP. Their records are not updated automatically (except in the case of Servant Keeper) but the next time you use the feature to synchronize your volunteer information, all the ministry qualifications and service preferences inside MSP will be preserved, and the names, phones, addresses, etc. of each volunteer will be updated. Changes to ministries for volunteers already in MSP need to be done manually, and are not subject to change via a re-sync to your management software.
