A. By free we mean we will not ask you to pay for your church's membership. We won't send you a bill. We won't ask you for your credit card. We really mean free as in "you don't pay anything". Of course it costs us money every month to provide this service, and we hope that if your church can afford to pay something for the time and convience our service provides, you'll choose one of the fee-based membership options. But if you believe your money is needed for more important needs in your local mission, then the free service is exactly that: Free.

A. We expect to have our fee-based membership features available in early 2007. We expect this release to include member self-service (individual members can edit their own contact information), expanded family member contact information, premium directory features, premium site branding, and mobile access options. A complete list of specific features will be provided at that time.

A. No. Your data can be immediately used in any membership level you choose. No data is "lost" in a membership level upgrade. However, if you "downgrade" to a lower membership level, you may not be able to view data related to features not included in the lower service level.

A. We accept checks presentable to United States banks and any form of payment handled by PayPal (including credit card). If you make credit card payments, note that we will NOT retain your credit card information.

A. We will provide a credit rounded up to the nearest full month of unused service. Please allow up to 2-4 weeks for service credit processing on membership cancellations.

A. Any church is welcome to register and use ChurchFamilyOnline.com Services. We can't speak or read much beyond English, and it's your responsibility to abide by any laws of your country and of the United States of America in your use of the website. Any payments you make to us for fee-based membership levels will need to be made in U.S. dollars and in a form acceptable to our bank. Beyond these business and legal limitation, we welcome all churches. We share one message for all people in the world.

A. Please read our Privacy statement. To start with, only members of your church can see other members' data. Our site is NOT like other so-called "social networking" sites where anything you post is accessible by anyone in the world. Within each church community, the administrator for your church assigns access rights to individual church members if member self-service is an available feature. Whenever anyone is using the system to search or edit contact information, the software automatically encrypts the information before it travels from a PC across the Internet to our server. Our servers are monitored 24/7 for security threats and are housed in a secure environment to reduce the threat of loss from fire, theft, or unauthorized access. It's probably much easier for someone to break into your church and steal a computer than it would be for someone to steal our servers and databases.

A. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a software component that encrypts data inside the computer so that it can not be read by anyone trying to "listen in" on two computers passing information to each other. Think of SSL as creating a "secret code" that only the two computers talking to each other understand. You can tell when your PC is using SSL to talk to our servers when you see the little padlock symbol of your browser is closed. Another way to tell when SSL is being used is to look at the URL. When you see the letters "https:" followed by the full URL address, the "s" is telling you that "hypertext transport protocol secure" is being used.

A. Access to your church data is controlled by login user names and passwords. Each user login is also restricted to one church, so that members of one church are not visible to a user logged into another church domain. The church administrator may create logins for some or all church members if member self-service is active. For non-members to see your church member data, they would have to obtain a login ID and password from someone. So as always, it's important for everyone to keep this information private and not share it with others. If someone thinks they may have lost their login credentials, the church administrator can quickly disable that particular login ID.

A. When you register, we generate a unique Internet address for your church on our site. This is different from any other URLs that you may have (e.g., your church website, etc.). You can also upload your church logo and have it appear in the top part of our application webpages. Some churches place a link using the URL we generate at registration time on their existing church website. This makes it fast and convenient for all church members to quickly get to our site without having to remember the URL.

A. This depends on the membership level for which you have registered. All membership levels provide a form for adding data. Administrators can add information for any church member, while individual church members can also add/edit information about themselves if member self-service capability is enabled by the administrator.

A. Pretty easy, actually. Once you have the pictures you want to use in an acceptable electronic form (we prefer JPEG, GIF or PNG), you simply upload them to our service. This process tells us to which member/family each picture belongs. A simple click of your mouse on "Pictorial Directory" will create the layout of text and pictures for all of your church members in a standard file format (a ".pdf" file) that you can print locally on your printer or take to a commercial printing house. You can print the pictorial directory in either color or blank and white.

A. We don't think so. Anyone who knows how to browse the internet will be able to use the look-up features of our service. Most will also be able to keep their own contact information up-to-date (e.g., add a new family member when a child is born, change a phone number and address following a move, etc.)

A. In addition to the core contact management capabilities our service provides, we also communicate additional information we think is useful and relevant to users. We provide a method for church leaders to communicate short informational messages about upcoming events. We also place offers we feel are broadly of interest to church members throughout the application. Typically there is only 1 such offer per page, and it is always placed in a non-intrusive (e.g., no pop-ups, forced reads, etc.) way. We do this primarily to be able to offer the free level of membership. In all cases, we do NOT share member contact information with our advertising partners. It is ALWAYS your decision, when you click on an offer, to decide if you want to reveal your identify and contact information to them.

A. Just a reasonably modern computer with a reasonably standard Internet Browser (e.g., Internet Explorer comes standard with Windows) and an internet connection, preferably DSL or Cable, but you can get buy with dial-up for most functions. Note that printing large directories or working with photographs over dial-up will be very slow due to the amount of data that must be transferred between your PC and our servers. That's it. No software to install. No files to back up. No additional hardware to buy.

A. Well, we try to make sure that doesn't happen. But anything made by humans can fail, and as the saying goes, fail when you least expect it. So we "expect" a failure any day, which means we back up all your data every day. Then, if something bad happens, we'll need a little time to restore the database from our last back up. Once we're done, your data will still be there. Of course, it's possible a failure could result in the loss of data recently entered after our last daily back-up, and we take additional steps to reduce this risk as well.

A. Generally yes. When we need to temporarily suspend service to add new functionality or upgrade software, or perform preventative system maintenance, we will schedule this during periods of low system usage and place a notice on the search page stating the time and expected duration of the outage.

A. We have contracted with a third-party firm who specializes in providing computing hosting services. All of our computers and databases are located in the United States. We work closely with our hosting service provider to ensure you experience a high level of reliability and performance - in addition to privacy and security.

A. We welcome your suggestions and comments for improving the service. Please send an email to and tell us what's on your mind. We can't respond to everything, but we will read everything!

A. To report bugs, send a description of the problem you experienced to . Include any screen images you think may help us understand the problem better. Note that this is NOT a support service - we do not generally respond individually to these reports unless we need to get additional information to reproduce or solve the problem. We DO, however, read all of these messages, and we thank you for helping us improve our service by pointing out problems you observe.