From Chaos to Clarity:Organizing Church Care with CareNote

From the Episode

What You'll Learn

• • The story behind CareNote's creation inside a real church
• • How to build a scalable, follow-through care system
• • Why care documentation is itself a form of ministry
• • How CareNote integrates with tools like Planning Center
• • How to empower volunteers and prevent burnout

Read the Full Conversation

Lightly edited for readability.

Introduction: A Pastor Who Builds Software

Donnell: The problem then became, when the senior pastor made that call, there was no report back to the system. So nobody else on the team would get the information that that person found out, even if they were the person who could best solve that need. It’s now locked in the senior pastor’s mind, and if that person’s not going to follow up on it, then nothing happens. And so that’s where the pain of the failure began to put pressure on our system to say, hey, we’ve got to get better at this, and we have to make whatever we do work in such a way that it streams information to us and then allows us to enter the stream by adding our information, so that we can create a holistic, complete picture of care for the people who matter most to us in our congregation.

Laura: From Hope Made Strong, this is the Care Ministry Podcast, a show about equipping ministry leaders and transforming communities through care. Supporting those in your church and community not only changes individuals’ lives, but it grows and strengthens the church. But we wanna do that without burning out, so listen in as we learn about tools, strategies, and resources that’ll equip your team and strengthen hope. Hey there. Laura here from Hope Made Strong.

Laura: When it comes to care ministry, the problem usually isn’t that people don’t care. No — people usually care. They want to care. But the issue is that there is no system to follow or help people follow through on care. Someone shares something with you in the church lobby. Maybe it’s a health concern or a job transition or a little update like, hey, my mom’s moving into hospice this week. And even with the best intentions, if you don’t have a way to track that or record that, that information can easily slip through the cracks. And that is why I am such a big believer in having a clear and consistent care process.

Laura: Now at Hope Made Strong, we use the Care Protocol. It’s made up of four simple but powerful steps: receive, respond, report, and follow up. And this gives your team, whether it’s your staff or volunteers, a way to turn compassion and caring into action. And if you haven’t seen this free guide yet that breaks these four pieces down, you’re gonna see a link in the show notes, and you can just download it for free.

Laura: But today, there is a guest on the podcast who just really gets it — who understands this need in a unique way. His name is Donnell Wyche. He is both a longtime pastor and a software engineer. I know, such a random combination, but I am so grateful, because he saw firsthand how easy it is for care to get lost in inboxes and sticky notes and memories, and he had the skills and the passion to build something better. Donnell is founder of CareNote. It’s a tool that helps churches track, assign, and follow up on care needs without everything getting buried in chaos. He has worked with over 300 churches who are supporting care for over 350,000 people. But what is cool is that it started as a personal project to help his very own church care better and help people not slip through the cracks, and it has grown from there.

Laura: And in our chat that you’re gonna hear, we talk about how documentation isn’t just an admin piece — documentation is actually part of ministry. It’s about making sure people feel seen and supported and followed up with, because that’s where real care happens. So if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed trying to keep up with care needs, or if you’ve wondered how to scale care as your church grows without burning out you and your team — you, friend, are in the right place. So let’s get into the chat with Donnell. Well, Donnell, thank you so much for being on the podcast. We have connected a number of times, brainstorming and chatting about care ministry and the integration of technology and how we can use that. So I am really excited to bring our conversation to the podcast listeners. Thank you so much for being on the Care Ministry Podcast.

Donnell: Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s a joy to be here with you and with folks who care deeply about their congregants, the health of the church, and the people that are within their congregation.

Laura: And the interesting thing that you come to the table with is you’re a tech guy. You’re a developer in software. You kind of — I don’t wanna say geek out, but you love that tech, early-adopter, developer kind of thing. But you also are a shepherd, a pastor. You are also very active in your community, and you have these two worlds that just smash together in what you’ve developed as CareNote. And we will get to CareNote in a minute, but I would love to know a little bit about what brought you to ministry in the church.

Donnell: Yeah. So I’ve been a pastor for twenty-five years in Ann Arbor in one congregation. So that’s been really fantastic, because you get to see a full life cycle. It’s almost a generation of folks that are passing through your congregation. And over the period of time that I’ve been ministering, we’ve seen easily six to nine thousand people come through our church’s doors. We’re in a university town, so it’s a very transient place where people are coming. We fall in love with them. They get a postdoc somewhere else. We weep as they go, or they’re called to different places, or they find their partner or their life’s passion outside of Ann Arbor. And so you have to develop a framework for how to do that.

Donnell: And over time, as you’ve noted, I’ve wanted to integrate technology and faith. From my earliest dabbling in blogging, I had a blog called Intersections, because I was thinking through the intersection of faith and technology and how those two things coming together can help us in our craft, in our profession, in our vocation as pastors. And so over time I’ve built lots of tools. Starting in youth ministry, I built the Youth Ministry Assistant, this wonderful little product to help youth pastors manage small groups of kids, follow up, send them postcards, have their addresses, things like that. It exists, but not in the same format.

Laura: Oh, tell me more.

Donnell: Just trying to solve what I call these paper cuts. We experience as pastors these paper cuts. And many pastors are excellent at remembering faces, remembering names, remembering the details. A lot of us aren’t as good at sharing that with our team so that we can collaboratively work in caring for our congregations. And so out of that, I’ve always tried to carry both of these worlds — spiritual formation and systems thinking — in tandem as I’ve approached my ministry. And so you begin to realize how hard it becomes as your congregation grows to keep track of everyone’s needs. And these aren’t the big needs, right? Someone goes into the hospital — that’s easy to keep track of. You’ve got a location, you’ve got a room, you’ve got a diagnosis. That’s easy. It’s the smaller things. It’s the transitions in someone’s work or vocation. It’s the change in their life — they are struggling with fertility. It’s the idea that they’ve moved into a new season where they’ve become a caregiver both to their parents and to their own kids, and what does it mean for them to care for themselves. And then it’s all of those people that are just quietly living in the middle of your congregation, where no one acknowledges the promotion that they get at work or the research paper that they publish or the presentation that they give. And so, in a sense, they don’t actually see themselves as being seen within the congregation.

The Disclosures at the Church Door

Donnell: And one of the things that I’ve learned is the door. The door of my congregation, of our church, is the place where people share these disclosures.

Laura: Yes. Those doors are key.

Donnell: So you’re saying hello or goodbye to someone and they’re sharing, hey, this week’s my twelfth anniversary at work, or my husband is retiring, or my mom is transitioning and so she’s going into hospice. And they’re not specifically asking for care. They’re not calling the church and saying, I need someone to provide this level of care for me. But they are asking for care in that disclosure, because what they’re hoping is that there’s some kind of exchange that happens. I share this information, you retain it, and then you follow up on it — and then I feel seen. And because I feel seen, then I know that I am loved. So how do you manage all of that when you have tens and dozens and hundreds and even thousands of people who are passing through your door sharing that? And thus my intersection with technology and faith emerged.

Laura: Wow. And we’re so grateful for that, because I think anyone who’s listened to this podcast long enough or been a part of Hope Made Strong can see why we are connected so well — it’s because we are really passionate about creating systems and strategies that support the care. Believing that care comes through relationship, care is offered through relationship, but there are so many things that you can develop that will support relationships being developed, fostered, nurtured. So it totally makes sense that we are connected and collaborating together. There’s such an alignment. I am sure, though — how long did it take you to get to this, seeing the problem, the pain point? There’s got to have been some frustrations. In your pastoral ministry, were there some things that you tried that just didn’t work? Or what was the catalyst? Because I know what CareNote is, and we’re hearing the passion and vision now, but that certainly did not happen overnight. That must have been festering and developed over some time.

Prayer Cards, Inboxes, and the Black Box

Donnell: Sure. Yeah. I think it’s when someone is hurt — when they share something and it’s not followed up on. And I think the— go ahead.

Laura: Yeah, no, I was just saying, yeah — that pain, the unintentional pain that you have caused because you have genuinely forgotten, or it slipped your mind, or you forgot to write it down. Those things happen, and you feel awful about it, but yet they happen a lot.

Donnell: Yeah. So we started with an analog — just a generic thing. It’s a prayer card. We have seat pockets in our congregation, in our sanctuary, and we built these little blue prayer cards. Those of you who are listening, you can’t see, but I’m holding one up right now.

Laura: Yeah. And they look very familiar. I’ve seen many a prayer card in a backseat pocket.

Donnell: And so we began to put those out and collect them, and we do two things. We wanna invite people to express gratitude, because we know that the genesis of joy in people’s lives is gratitude. It’s not that it’s a one-to-one, but if we don’t experience gratitude, we also can’t experience joy. So we want to teach our congregants how to practice gratitude. So we started with a prayer card, and it starts off, “I’m grateful for.” So it puts you in the right frame of mind that, hey, there are things that are going well in your life. There aren’t just all bad things. And then, “I’m asking for.” And we had a part on the card that said you could put your name on it and you can put your contact information so we could follow up with you. So we just started trying to figure out, alright, how are we gonna handle this? How are we gonna manage this? So we would collect them, and in our staff meeting every week we’d just pass them around, and then we would assign someone the card. And that all went well in the meeting, but there was no ability to do the follow-up. Did you actually make the phone call? Did you talk to the person? What did the person say? Is there something else that we need to do? So probably months and months of us being very attentive to the prayer card, but not very attentive to the follow-up, revealed we needed a mechanism to begin to manage this. So we started where everybody does: with email. We had the staff administrator type them into an email, and then we assign people via email. Now we’re exchanging emails as the mechanism to do this assignment and follow-up. And you can imagine — because you work with people like me and my church and other pastors all across the world — this becomes unmanageable very, very quickly.

Laura: Just fills up the inbox.

Donnell: Exactly. And what it also does is it limits who can follow up. What you’re doing by keeping it inside the box of the staff — whether they’re paid, or volunteer interns, or even vocational folks who don’t get paid but don’t have a real clear role and they’re not a deacon or an elder — you’re limiting who can actually participate in care. And so this started to move for me from email into — I’m dating myself now — a FileMaker database. This was a database system that was on the Mac. It’s pretty old. And so that was the first iteration of CareNote before CareNote was even a glimmer in my eye. It was to bring all of this into a database so that we could do that assignment. But again, that just allows us to do the data capture; it wasn’t allowing anyone to do the follow-up. So the web emerges and I begin to build web-based applications, and my first is a monolith like Planning Center or Breeze or ChurchSuite, those types of products, where you have note-taking and then people can log in. And this is where the first failure comes, because you have to incentivize your staff to log into that tool to get the information—

Laura: Oh, the log in.

Donnell: And your staff, if they’re like mine, just won’t do it. At the time I wasn’t the senior pastor, and our senior pastor had a dedicated admin. So that admin would log in and present the senior pastor with a printout that she would tape to his door, so that when he got to work, he would take it off and then he would have a call list. So that was basically how we got all of this started. And the problem then became, when the senior pastor made that call, there was no report back to the system. So nobody else on the team would get the information that that person found out, even if they were the person who could best solve that need. It’s now locked in the senior pastor’s mind, and if that person’s not going to follow up on it, then nothing happens. And so that’s where the pain of the failure began to put pressure on our system to say, hey, we’ve got to get better at this, and we have to make whatever we do work in such a way that it streams information to us and then allows us to enter the stream by adding our information, so that we can create a holistic, complete picture of care for the people who matter most to us in our congregation.

Receive, Respond, Report, Follow Up

Laura: I love how you’re describing that. You’re putting stories to what we call the care procedure. People often ask, okay, how do we offer care? And we said, well, there’s four steps, there’s four procedures — and we’ll link in the show notes a download that you can have that identifies these four — but you just described it. It’s number one, how do you receive care? There are some people I’ve heard say, well, there’s not a lot of care needs in the church. And I was like, mm-mm. That is not true if you’ve not created opportunity where people can access or report or give care needs. So how do you receive care needs? How do you respond to care needs? Like you said, is it a person? Is it a team? What are you doing? Then how do you report, so that data is captured, so you know who got a gift card or who got a visit or who got a call, or what happened. And then the fourth one, which is most often forgotten, is how do you follow up? And I think those four components are absolutely essential for being able to provide well-rounded care.

Laura: And you’ve created this model — you’ve created a software platform that allows people to go through that care procedure for sure. That’s awesome. So for those who are curious — I hear all the time, people are like, okay, yeah, but we do prayer requests. And I’m like, okay, so how do you do these four steps? And then they’re like, I don’t know. You tell me. How do you do it? And I was like, well, you could cheat the system by accessing some of those products, but it always is limited, and it requires a high degree of administration and follow-up by an individual. So if you don’t have the staffing or the capacity in a volunteer, you need some sort of technology to be able to help this happen. And that is exactly what CareNote is. So can you explain what CareNote is for the people?

Building the Care Request Workflow with a Hospital Case Manager

Donnell: Sure. Yeah. At its core, CareNote is a tool that helps you take the compassion that you have as a care provider — whether you’re a pastor, a volunteer, a deacon, an elder — and turn it into action. That’s it. Very, very simple. And inside of that, there are some additional things, which you have already highlighted in your four steps. It’s documentation. How do we get that care request so that it’s visible to the people that we need to? And then what do we do with that? And so CareNote comes in maybe two flavors. We have an opinionated care request workflow. And that got started because a care provider in Kentucky reached out to me when she took over a job back in, I think it was 2018 or so, and she was managing a Catholic parish of about 15,000 people, and they hired her to do all of the care ministry. And she had worked in the hospital setting — she was a case manager, and she understood how that worked. She used a standard program for intake, processing, and outtake. So she called me up on the phone and said, Donnell, I found your product — it wasn’t called CareNote at the time, it was called Community Center for Churches; it doesn’t exist anymore — and she said, you’ve got 80% of what I want. Are you willing to help me build the remaining 20%? And I said, Denise, absolutely.

Laura: Alright.

Donnell: So we got to work, and it actually took us a year to build this. And I’m not ashamed that it took longer than I think a lot of people talk about when you get into the space, because sometimes when you’re in the tech space, a lot of what I see every day is, oh, I started building it in one weekend, I built this thing and now millions of people use it. I was like, sure, you built it in one weekend and millions of people use it — I don’t think it does what you think it does, and I don’t think they’re using it the way that you think they are. A lot of these things actually take iterations. And so Denise and I started down this process of building out this workflow, this care request workflow, where it comes in, it gets entered, it gets assigned to someone. That person gets an opportunity to accept or reject the assignment. And this is the key that has been transformative for a lot of people, because in a lot of churches it’s, hey, you get an assignment, you’ve just got to do it. Well, what if you’re out of town? What if you’re sick? What if you don’t like the person that you’ve been assigned to? You don’t know how to tell the care administrator, I don’t do well with this kind of person. And so how do you do that? So we built in this process where a person can accept or reject it, and if they reject it, they can put a note in to say, I’m unavailable, I’m out of town, or, I don’t have a good relationship with this person and I don’t think I’m the right person — but guess who is? My wife. Go ahead and assign this person to my partner, or my nursery partner, who can just rock this out in a way that I would never be good at following up with this person.

Donnell: And then the software checks to say, hey, are you on track? Have you missed a due date? If you’ve missed a due date, it sends a reminder and then notifies the care administrator that the care request may be stalled because nothing has happened. And that’s the black box: I’ve assigned it, you’ve accepted it, but now I’m waiting for your follow-up, your report, and you haven’t given it to me and the due date has passed. And you don’t want to be the kind of person who has to micromanage your whole team. Plus, if you’ve got tens or dozens of requests, that’s all you would spend your time on — following up with people to say, did you call them? What happened? And you don’t want to do that, so I built that into the software so that the software does it itself. And then you have the report.

Sixty Volunteers, Average Age 64

Donnell: And over time Denise and I built this out, and it started to work. And then I got my first church outside of Denise, and it was a church in Long Beach, California. They’re still a customer. They’ve been a customer for five or six years or so, and they’ve come through every iteration — when it was a community center, when I separated it out the first time, when I separated it out the second, the third time — they’re still here. And they’re just a fantastic community, because it’s all volunteer-run. The care administrator was a volunteer. She recruited 60 other volunteers, and the average age of her volunteers was 64. A lot of people seem to sometimes poo-poo on seniors and technology, but they know how to use their iPhones, they know how to use their iPads, and we’ve made CareNote easy enough that they can use it. And they made 1,200 in-person visits and captured 1,200 reports of those visits. And now the new care administrator has all of that information. They have all of the questions that were asked, they have all of the answers that were given, and they can use that to build training, to bring on new people. And we’ve made CareNote even better for them. So that’s a very long-winded explanation of what CareNote is, but at its core it’s just taking the compassion that we have to care for each other and turning it into action. And then we have a whole bunch of other things that are a part of the software, but I’ll pause and let you give me a follow-up.

Laura: I think what is key here is that — I don’t wanna use this term because we use it in health care, at least when I was working in the health care world — it decentralizes care. So it takes the pressure off the few people, the lead pastor or the care pastor, and it helps the church engage volunteers and foster that culture-of-care mentality. That care doesn’t always have to be done by the pastor — although care most often is done by the pastor — but it doesn’t have to be. And this is a tool that can be used to help engage, support, equip, and keep volunteers accountable to the care that they’re offering. Right? Like you said, it’s that bridge to say, okay, we as a church care for people. I think most churches really, really want to care for people. Their intention is to provide wraparound community support, love, and compassion. But how can you do that when your church is growing? How can you do that when you have limited resources? And this is a tool that plugs in and allows the capacity to care to grow, and decentralizes care so that the congregation can begin to care for one another.

Milestones, Birthday Texts, and One-Click Reports

Donnell: Yeah. And then we wanna mine the data. So this means we can capture milestones. Someone comes out of recovery or has finished a physical rehab, and you want to say, hey, you just finished your rehab for your knee surgery — let’s go for a walk. Right? Those little touch points that can be daylighted, and then you use your pastoral skills, talents, expertise to have that touch point. I was using CareNote just this week with a milestone, just for birthdays. Birthdays are so important for people. And every day, CareNote sends you a notification of whose birthdays or milestones are happening today. And so I reached out just via text: hey, I’m thinking about you. It’s your birthday. You’re a gift to me. You’re a gift to your church community. I’m glad you were born, and I’m praying for you. Just a very simple touch point. Well, the congregant was on vacation in Ludington, which is a beach town in Michigan, having a really great time, and she was like, who is this? — because I was texting from my church phone. And so she’s reading the note and she’s like, this is Pastor Donnell. And so then she shows it to her friend — my pastor just sent me a text wishing me a happy birthday. She shares it with her husband, her daughter. She’s now at church on Sunday. I walk in, she says, Pastor, thank you so much for your birthday greeting. The other ushers are around her, because she’s an usher. She’s like, the pastor sent me a birthday greeting. It’s just happening, and I’m like, oh, this is such the smallest threshold of care. But in that moment, she felt very seen.

Donnell: So it’s tracking the prayer requests — knowing that one prayer request is not a one-and-done, that someone’s praying for a job and so you need to check in, or someone goes in for surgery and now you need to check in with them post-op. How do you do that? Or how do you get your intercessors — we have a group of intercessors that pray in the morning before our church celebration — how do you get them into intercession? Well, CareNote can take all of your care requests and create a prayer list, where it summarizes what’s going on in the church over the last week, and you can walk that into your intercessors and say, hey, would you pray for these people as you pray for our church today? These are those simple, easy ways that — because the information is inside this tool, and we’re thinking deliberately in a purpose-built way — we bring this information to the forefront so that the people in your congregation get what they need and can follow up.

Donnell: One click, you now have a report. I was just talking to a care provider in Cadillac, Michigan, who has a team of elders and deacons and a pastoral team — so three separate teams. And she was saying, Donnell, I’m trying to figure out how I give everybody the information. And I said, well, tell me what you are working on. So she told me, and she was going to do it in a spreadsheet, because that’s the simplest, easiest way for us to do these things. And I said, well, let’s not build a spreadsheet — let’s see if we can build it in CareNote. And she gave me the feedback, and then I built the report for her. And now she can go in and filter by prayer requests and give that to the prayer team. By care requests — give that to the deacons, who are the ones who give the care. By follow-up — and now the pastors and the elders know what’s going on. It’s the same report, but she gets four different filters within the report, all with one click, and now she can distribute it. And then we were talking, because she was going to have to take the report out of CareNote and put it in an email and then send it, and I said, well, that’s silly — let’s not do that. I’m going to build an action so that once you’ve built the report that you want, you’ll be able to click one button, select the people who should receive it, and then send it right in CareNote, so that you don’t actually have to leave the tool to distribute the information that you want the right party within the tool to find.

Integrations: Planning Center, Breeze, and ParishSOFT

Laura: Yep. And another thing that I don’t think we’ve hit on is that you have built this in such a way that, yes, you can develop all these reports and communications and data and all of this stuff inside CareNote, but CareNote actually integrates really, really well with a number of other tools that your churches are already using. And so you don’t have to re-enter your whole database. You actually can streamline that quite well. And what I like about this is, number one, that you are receiving feedback from people. Number two, you’re trying to make this simple and easy for our senior volunteers to be able to use. And number three, you’re making it specifically focused on church care needs. This isn’t a tool that is really for something else, but we can make it work — this is for care ministry. And it’s so cool.

Donnell: Yeah. So we have a built-in integration with Planning Center, with Breeze. We’re building an integration with monday.com, because some people use monday.com for forms. We are always open to meeting new churches who use different tools. So we have Catholic parishes that use ParishSOFT, which is the premier Catholic parish software product, and they called me up and they were like, we love CareNote, but does it work with ParishSOFT? And I said, it doesn’t — but if you become a customer, I’ll build the integration. And we figured that out. That was nontrivial, because ParishSOFT made that very challenging — you have to buy an API.

Laura: Oh, wow.

Donnell: And this is a priest who has two congregations in neighboring towns — he’s one priest for two congregations. So we had to figure out how to make that work without it being super complicated. And you’re right — I think one of the things that I have learned in this space is I want to be a good partner with the churches that I’m serving. And in order to be a good partner, you have to be able to take feedback. People will say all the time, hey, this is fantastic, but I wish it did this. I had a new church — again, a lot of churches in Kentucky are in my stories today, I don’t know why that is — but I had a new church in Kentucky who reached out, and he asked for a three-column view. And I hadn’t thought about a three-column view. He wanted the contact on the left side, he wanted the care request that started everything in the center, and he wanted a summary of updates so that he could then share that with his deacons. And I said, alright — if you become a customer of CareNote, I’ll build the report. And he became a customer, and we built the report. And now other churches get that report. So that church I was talking about in Cadillac — when we started talking, I was like, oh, I just built a new report. I haven’t even released it officially, but it’s live in the software. And I showed it to her, and she’s like, oh, this is exactly what I need. And I just really want to be honest with you, Laura — that moment where somebody feels overwhelmed, they feel the externality of the pressure of the need, and they find that CareNote is a partner for them, and you can see their shoulders drop, because they realize, oh, this is going to make this task of mine that I’m carrying easier. It’s so delightful. I absolutely love it. I love it. And I’ll give you one more—

Laura: Yes, please.

The Planning Center Note Sync

Donnell: One more story that stays in this theme. I had a church that reached out that uses Planning Center, and they wanted to use CareNote, but they wanted the notes that they put in CareNote to go back into Planning Center. And Planning Center is tricky, because Planning Center is a big — it’s a fantastic tool, but it discloses a lot of information. And so one of the concerns that this administrator had is, if we push stuff back into Planning Center, will it leak out through the Church Center app, where people will be able to click on a profile and see the notes? Because you have to manage those notes very carefully in Planning Center, or else it’ll be available to everyone. So I took a look at what Planning Center provided, and I came up with a solution. And what we are now able to do, which is unique, is you can use my product, which already connects to Planning Center — you can use Planning Center forms with CareNote for intake, that first thing that you talked about in your list of four, and so that data lives forever in Planning Center. But then you can do the assignment in CareNote, you can capture the notes of the assignment in CareNote, and then you can push the notes in a report back into Planning Center. And that’s something that, when I got that working and showed it to customers, they were delighted, because — my goodness — it’s huge.

Donnell: We had one pastor who said, I am not going to use any other tool. I am only gonna use Planning Center, so the notes need to be in Planning Center. And the administrator was having to take data and rekey it into Planning Center. Oh, my soul. And when we talked, she’s like, Donnell, this is literally my whole job. My job is taking these assignments, getting the reports via email, and then typing them up and putting them back into Planning Center. And I said, okay, I don’t want to demean your work, but can I help you make that better? And I said, let’s use CareNote. I showed her how to set it all up — I said, enable the note sync, and then it does it in the background. And then I showed it to her, and she just sat there and paused and just stared—

Laura: At me — a single tear drops down her face.

Donnell: I mean, this is a real story. This is just a real story. She was just so grateful, because now she’s not having to do repetitive work. And I think that’s also a missing part in a lot of this — that very faithful church secretary or administrator who is the glue keeping the care apparatus in most churches in place, and they are often overlooked and are ignored, and they know what’s going on inside the church. So when I get an opportunity to talk to them, the thing that I do is I listen. I listen, because they always daylight pain, and as soon as they daylight the pain, I write it down and I say, what would be something that, in the next thirty days, if this pain went away, would feel like a win for you? And then they just give me a task list, and I’m often able to turn those things around. And that’s the joy. Honestly, that is the joy of building this software. It’s the collaboration with the churches. It’s the collaboration with the care providers.

Belonging, Purpose, and Hope

Donnell: And then one more thing — I know I said the last thing was the one more thing, but here’s the one more thing. I am learning so much about care from people. I’m learning how people care. I’m learning the kinds of care that they provide. I’m learning the ways in which we can provide that care. I’m learning about the way that you can bring in people who have unique skills. Like, there’s a plumber in your church who will gladly unclog toilets and drain sinks, but that person’s not gonna do anything else in your church as a volunteer. And so how do you put them into service in your community? Well, you need a tool that daylights his capability. He doesn’t want to log into a care management system to go drain a toilet, but if you know he exists, you can use CareNote’s volunteer feature, which is free, and assign him an assignment to drain someone’s toilet — and that is going to make him feel like he’s contributing to his faith community, because he’s giving his skill set in a way that can be utilized. I just think that is the church. Right? That we are this community to come alongside, as you say, and wrap around these services and these needs in the congregation.

Laura: It’s so good, and it just continues to highlight these core values of what care ministry is, and the core purpose of care ministry. You don’t have to have all the bells and whistles. You don’t have to meet every need. But what a church needs to do is to foster belonging, purpose, and hope. Belonging — helping people feel seen and known and welcomed, and we talked a lot about that. Purpose — engaging people in developing their purpose and God-given gifts, and helping them become part of something bigger than themselves and seeing that God’s plans for them are good, and that the gifts that they have can be a part of God’s kingdom. And then hope — which is where we come alongside people in times where they don’t have hope, and we can be caretakers of hope in those moments, as well as creating spaces for stories and testimonies to be shared, because that is a provoker of hope. And so this is why I’m so excited about our collaboration — because you get it, and the tool that you’re offering supports these core functions of a care ministry, belonging, purpose, and hope, and aligns with how we have described that care needs to be offered: how you receive care, how you respond to care, how you report care, and then how you follow up with care. And so I am so excited to connect with you and become friends with you and collaborate with you. It’s really just a cool thing how God is aligning. And I think it’s the timing of this — you have developed, started this… I don’t know, when did you start this? You said 2018 was the earliest time. Was it way before that?

Donnell: Yeah. I’ve been building CareNote, unbeknownst to me, since 2008.

Laura: 2008? Oh, Lord.

Donnell: Yeah. I officially released the product CareNote in — let’s see — November of 2022.

Laura: Okay. And it’s interesting, because Hope Made Strong started in 2018, and then officially in 2019. So right around those timelines where these ideas were really starting to develop. And I think it just shows that God is up to something, that this is aligning with a lot of people. As well, I’ve noticed that a lot of churches have begun intentional care ministry in this season. And so I just think God is faithful and knows way more than we do, thankfully, and he’s aligning all of this together. And so when I think back — 2008, okay, let’s take that. If you could write yourself an email or send yourself a voice note for Donnell circa 2008, what would you tell your former self?

Advice to His 2008 Self: Most Churches Have No Care System

Donnell: Oh, wow. That’s a really great question. So much. I would tell myself to invest in some specific stocks—

Laura: Amazon, anyone?

Donnell: So I think one of the things I would say is, around that time, there was really the emergence of the church management system, because Church Community Builder had just started. And I saw it, and I had built a competing product called Community Center for Churches at the time. And for myself — because I’m a little bit of a nerd — the thing that I would have in my email is, hey, learn this specific programming, because there was a programming language that Church Community Builder was built on, and it would have been helpful for me from the onset to have been able to integrate into that product. I would have told myself, hey, don’t build a church management monolith — build this CareNote, because that’s really what you are working towards. You built Community Center to help your congregation care better for the members of your congregation, but what you were really trying to build was CareNote. You just didn’t know it yet. And then: focus on a stream. I see it as a stream, right, where people are adding care requests into the stream, we’re adding our expertise into the stream, we’re meeting there, we’re resolving that, and people are being cared for, they’re being loved, they’re being seen — and then that allows them to care for and love and see others. And so it’s this reciprocal system. So really figure this out and get good at it, because then I would have had, what, twelve or fourteen years of time working on this. But I’ve caught up. I’ve caught up really, really quickly, and we’re seeing teams — I have a solo pastor in the Ohio Valley, he’s a Methodist minister, and he has two congregations of 25 people. That is his story. And he needed a tool to help him, and so we just talked, and he came into CareNote, and he’s excited. And I know that I have a lot more to learn from a pastor who is pastoring a congregation of 25 people, as much as I have to learn from one of my newest and largest customers in the Chicagoland area — what I would call a megachurch, five or six thousand regular attenders. They’re coming in right now, and they’re building out their care ministry. And so I assumed that everybody had a care system.

Laura: Oh, Lord. No. I wish. That’s my goal right there.

Donnell: And I am learning that no matter the size of the church, most churches do not actually have a pastoral care system. And I am surprised by that. I actually am floored by it. And so one of the biggest things that I get asked by new customers is, do you have a ready-made care management system that we can implement? And in my mind — and this reveals something about my thinking — I’m like, why would you want to use my system in your congregation? And then I’ve had to coach myself: A, people are asking for help, so help them — they’ll say no. And B, what people are revealing is they have nothing.

Laura: They have nothing.

Donnell: And so starting from something that they can modulate or modify or refactor into their church is better than what they have. And so then I realized, oh, I have two and a half decades of pastoral ministry, of a church that at its height was 2,500 and at its floor was 140 people, and so I’ve had to manage a congregation through those thresholds. And so I actually do have something that I can offer — like, here’s what you can start with, number one, and here’s what you can do, number two. And I honestly didn’t think that I had anything to offer, and so that’s why I was working on the software, because there, at least, I thought, oh, I actually have something to offer. But now I realize it’s a both-and.

Care Is the Gospel: Closing Reflections

Laura: Absolutely. Oh, man. Well, I am so thankful that you have been faithful for all of these years and that you have pursued this, because I am biased, though, Donnell. Let’s be honest. I am biased. I think the care ministry is the most important part of the church. Although I’m sure every core piece of the team—

Donnell: People would, you know—

Laura: Fight me on that.

Donnell: Wrestle with you on it.

Laura: Kids or youth ministry might be like, yeah, we’ll see you — see you in the parking lot. But I just think it’s the sticky part that brings people together, keeps people there, and it’s the gospel. I think care is gospel. And so I appreciate you and our aligned hearts of being intentional and strategic around care, and for you stewarding the wisdom and experience that you have in building software, because I am very grateful. So thank you so much, and thank you for being on the podcast. It’s been great.

Donnell: It’s great to be here.

Laura: Yeah. And so if you wanna check out CareNote, we’re gonna have the link in the show notes. You can go to carenote.app, and you can get all of that information there. But, Donnell, people are gonna hear from you again. We are featuring you on the podcast. We are having you for workshops. They will get to know you well in our community for sure. So thank you. Thank you again.

Donnell: Yeah. Thanks for having me. It’s been a joy having this opportunity to talk about what I’m doing, and I think more importantly, how we can serve congregations and care providers in doing the thing that they want to do, which is take their compassion and transform it into action.

Laura: Love that. Love that. Alright. Take care. This conversation with Donnell really brought together what we’re all about at Hope Made Strong. It’s about building systems that make sustainable care possible. When care is organized, it becomes scalable. When it’s scalable, it can be truly shared — across your whole team, with your volunteers, and with the church and broader community. That’s what creates space for real compassion to flourish. You don’t need to do more; you just need a strategy that helps you do what matters and do it well. Well, thanks so much for listening, and as always, take care of yourself and care well.