Budget Planning

As regular readers will know I (as in the tech support section of the church I attend) have finally been given a proper and official budget.

Not that I’ve seen it yet but I’ve been told a fixed amount per month will be set aside or made available for improvement of the church’s IT. I took that a step further and told the pastor that whilst the first year probably would be spent mostly on improving / getting us up to scratch it wouldn’t just be that. I see myself as the guardian of things technical within the church in whatever format they come.

So that could be IT. But equally it’s support of the worship team by use of projectors and associated hardware. Or how about support of the lighting, sound, media, drama teams and so on. In short, if it affects the church and it involves a plug (a crude but useful pictorial analogy) then it involves me.

So how does one, after 23yrs of scratching for pennies go about working out what to do with a budget?

For my part it was quite easy.

I set out a list of requirements as I saw them.

I then discussed these with someone in the church most affected by & understands them.

I wrote a list of pros and cons for each item and assigned a weighting to it. So for example getting wi-fi into the church was given a lower priority than sorting out the physical infrastructure.

Adding an extra domain controller was given a higher priority than the infrastructure.

And backups were given the highest weighting.

In my mind it came down to this… if the building went up in flames tomorrow or similar then how quickly could I get the church back up and running? Remember we are talking about 5 full time jobs and probably as many again part time roles that need to be supported and paid for. If we can’t run the business (not the church) then these people become unemployed.

After deciding the priorities – which basically boiled down to a disaster recovery plan it was fairly easy to decide on where the funds need to be spent. For this we then needed to price each item up and decide if its an on-going month by month cost or a one off expenditure.

Our final step was to see how we could fit these items in to the budget assigned.

So to recap:

• take stock of what needs doing.
• discuss with others
• create a pro / con list for each item
• assign a weighting
• price and purchase

In short we need to ensure the church’s data is backed up (beyond its current process) and that we take steps to minimise downtime to the entire staff first followed by individuals afterwards.

Next year we can start looking at longer term projects and adding the bonus stuff in.

So what about yourself?

• Do you have a budget at church for tech / IT / media?
• Do you plan how to spend it?
• Have you any suggestions for a budget newbie?