I was just reading some advice from the Founder of Feedburner (a service I love and recommend to people all the time). Talking about customer service, Dick Costolo says:

When you’re building a business that you feel needs to be customer-centric, the path to success lies not in hanging signs on walls or writing mantras and slogans. It’s reinforcing to your team that a) there is only one ‘constituency’, the customer, and that transparency is a company value.

I am posting this to hold myself and this product accountable in the future. I will say this as plainly as I can, Plaid’s only concern is delivering an amazing product to people in ministry. We are NOT serving churches or administrators. We are not doing what’s in their best interest. We are sold out to do our best for the people in the trenches of serving people in the grind of weekly ministry.
Plaid wants to be the preferred solution provider for ministries: children, youth, campus, singles, small churches, church plants and the thousands of individual teachers. I post this so that our future customers can refer to it when we fall short of providing insanely great products and support.

Blessings, Tim

Individuals and ministry teams want to follow up with new people and meet the felt needs of their members. The problem is that often software and technology get in the way. In fact, software is traditionally a burden.

Plaid is software designed to serve the core tasks of communicating and tracking in ministry. We have two guiding principles:

1.) We want to make it easy to organize and use contact lists.

The first part of this process is to make it quick to add and update contact information. It must simple to get the information off a handwritten form and into a database. This needs to be painless and even fun. Once contact information is in the system, we want to make it easy edit, organize and use.

Plaid allows teams to collaborate in the process of organizing their lists. Maybe you want to build an ad hoc list, or create list that will be used every week for a year.
All lists created in Plaid can be used. Maybe you want to send an email reminder to 44 people about Vacation Bible School, create a map for the youth van driver or print out a call sheet for a small group leader.

Plaid will help you get things done then it will get out of the way. We will not add overhead without value to the daunting task of weekly ministry.
2.) We give individuals and teams new ways to feel good about their ministry.

The under-appreciated truth is that ministry is hard and service is often unnoticed (as compared to giving which is celebrated and tracked to excruciating detail). What makes ministry even harder is the added “spiritual” expectation that practitioners are supposed to be okay with that…

The core belief of Plaid is that practitioners do a great job and although churches sometimes do forget to recognize your work; we built some software that values your sacrifice.

The sad fact is that too many of people in ministry are burnt-out or indifferent. We want Plaid to help them feel good about their service.

And Plaid is designed to do this better than any ChMS in history. We are not spending time building attendance or giving reports. We are going to help you track and monitor interactions with people. Then we are going to give everyone a chance to see what the “Plaid Nation” is doing.

Without revealing private information, we are going to show in real time what is happening across all the ministries using Plaid. We are going to create an experience where you feel confident about your ministry and feel connected to something much bigger.

In the end, our goal is to make people feel good about ministry. And in the process, we believe there is an opportunity to build a sustainable business.