When Accordance 1.0 was released 25 years ago, there were seemingly dozens of Bible software programs to choose from. Today, only a small handful are still in operation. So how has Accordance managed to keep going strong after all these years?
In this series of posts, I’ll consider 25 reasons I think we’ve managed to defy the odds. In this post, I’ll cover the first five reasons, which all have to do with the motivations that drive us.
Motivational Reasons
1. We’re passionate about the Bible. We believe the Bible is the most important book you can study, and we’re passionate about helping people do that. The more we see your excitement after you discover something amazing in the Scriptures, the more motivated we are to keep doing what we do.
2. We value original language study. While many seminaries are scaling back their Greek and Hebrew study requirements, we still believe original language study is important not just for scholars, but for pastors and ministry professionals as well. Of course, we also recognize that it’s increasingly hard to do in our fast-paced and frantic world. We get to design tools that make language study faster, easier, and more enjoyable.
3. We value effective teaching. Accordance has always been first and foremost a Bible study program. But ever since Accordance 1.0, we have also focused on making it a powerful Bible teaching program.
Most of our staff, and most of our customers, are active in teaching the Bible in some way, so we provide lots of visual resources to illustrate the world of the Bible, analytics to demonstrate various aspects of the biblical text, presentation features which enable you to present right from within Accordance, resource links which let you point other Accordance users to relevant texts or tools. The list goes on, but you get the point.
4. We take pride in our work. It’s something of an inside company joke that seemingly every Accordance employee is a perfectionist. “That’s good enough” is just not a phrase you hear much around here. From our programmers to our module developers to our office staff and various support personnel, we are to a man (and woman) committed to delivering an exceptional product with exceptional service. It sounds like a marketing cliché, but it’s really just my own personal observation of how everyone on our staff seems to operate.
5. We value our customers. Again, it sounds like a cliché, but I’ve seen again and again how every member of the Accordance team truly cares about making our customers happy.
Last year when another Bible software company closed its doors and we had an influx of new users switching to Accordance, our programming team went to great lengths to add new features that would ease their transition.
As I was writing this blog post, a user on our forums pointed out some garbled text in a commentary. In less than an hour, our module development team investigated the problem, fixed it, and released an update! No less than three Accordance employees responded to that thread.
And don’t even get me started on the lengths our sales staff will go to make sure customers are happy with their purchases.
That’s 5 motivational reasons why Accordance is still going strong after 25 years. In my next post, we’ll look at reasons related to our business and development philosophy.
David Lang is Vice President of Development for Accordance Bible Software.