How Nexkey made this church safer and easier to run through the pandemic

“Now that we have Nexkey, we want to deploy even more of it because we can see it as part of our everyday.”

Like many places of worship, Central Peninsula Church was hit hard by having to shut down during the pandemic. Charlie Royce, Director of Church Administration, had to find a way to run the church as safely and efficiently as possible from home with deliveries and construction workers coming in and out. The existing key system was just not up to speed. 

They pulled the trigger for Nexkey because it was the easiest and most cost-effective way to deploy a modern access control system in a 30+ year old building which also met the feature requirements needed to open the doors to the right people, at the right times.

Now that Charlie has Nexkey, his plan is to expand it to every door in the Church so he can safely open up to the hundreds of people and many different groups who come every week. Read more about why Charlie “really wants to emphasize how helpful (Nexkey) is for a church.”

Can you tell me about yourself and Central Peninsula Church?

Absolutely. I'm the Director of Church Administration. I'm responsible for finances, the facilities, HR, and technology. CPC or Central Peninsula Church is an independent Bible teaching church with approximately 1500 attendees.  We're located in the San Francisco Bay Peninsula, established in 1965, and we moved to our current facility in 1988.

The final phase of our building was completed in 2001. So we have a mix of old and new buildings. 

How has the church been affected by the COVID-19 shutdowns, and how do you expect everyone to come back? 

On Friday, March 6, 2020 we decided that it would be a good idea to not meet in person on Sunday morning. It was a really difficult and big decision, but with everything that was happening, we felt like that was the right decision, right choice. 

Our building is used to having multiple meetings all week, every day of the week. Just the logistics of keeping everybody six feet apart, the mix of chairs, we can't reach the capacity in which we’re allowed.

This year, we are going to be meeting for Palm Sunday and for Easter. So we're really excited about that. 

How many people, groups, staff were coming in and out before the pandemic?

A lot of people, because every day we would at least have two or three, sometimes four or five meetings. Our women's Bible study would host 300 women in the morning and then 400 women in the evening. Our men would host 175 men in the morning.

We had a number of groups that were more in the size of 20 to 30 people. And then we had our youth or middle school that was about 60 and our high school that was about 40 people. On Sundays we have close to 800 people coming.

So a lot of activity in the church and a lot of people. 

When did you start looking into mobile access control and why?

I've actually been looking at mobile access for a while. Maybe even say two years ago, three years ago, something like that. We knew we wanted to have something and we were exploring. 

I was convinced when the pandemic hit and the Nexkey Solo came out. The Nexkey Solo made it such an easy decision. We added a Controller and Solo but it was really needing to get access, to give people access to the building during COVID that motivated us to move forward. 

Now that we have Nexkey, we want to deploy even more of it because we can see it as part of our everyday. Once everybody and everything's back to normal, the advantages are huge.

Before Nexkey, what was your experience using keys? 

So before Nexkey, we had to distribute keys to whoever needed access to the building. With all those groups, even a group of 10 people, the leader needed a key to get in.

Although we had multiple meetings in the evening, we never knew which leader was going to be there first or if a leader would come. So we wanted to make sure that everybody had the key to get in and in order to maintain security. 

Then for staff, we needed to give them a higher level so that they could get into their offices and areas in which most people weren't allowed to go. It was very expensive to duplicate all those keys, and then very difficult to manage who had what key.

We had to keep track of who has a key and then try to contact them once we realized they're no longer needing that key. Sometimes they've already moved out of the area, or they don't even remember which key our key is. It was very frustrating. 

We realized that a lot of keys were distributed. The plan is once we deploy all the Nexkey that we want to deploy, we will rekey all other keys so that we won't have to have this master key system of three levels.

What's the biggest advantage for you with using Nexkey?

This one is a little difficult for me to answer because there are so many. Just picking one reason is hard, but if I was to say the biggest advantage of using Nexkey is it's ease of deployment.

I looked at a lot of technologies. We wanted to deploy your Controller technology because it had the feature set that we wanted. And similar feature sets on key cards were very expensive and required us to electrify the door. This is a door that was installed in 1988. I didn't want to have to replace the whole door. 

The Nexkey solution was very easy to retrofit an old door. Not having to truly electrify the whole push rod, the panic bar, was very beneficial. 

That's what really, really sold me, particularly on the Controller. And then there’s the Solo. It's just so ingenious. That in and of itself would allow you to open the door. You can retrofit that into any existing, regular door.

Again, this building is from 1988, so trying to make those individual room doors work, the Nexkey Solo is just a really good solution for that.

Has Nexkey helped you during this COVID-19 pandemic, how?

Yeah, absolutely. With shelter-in-place, we all stayed at home. We weren't coming to church, but that didn't mean that church work wasn't getting done. Things were still getting delivered and many people were still sending checks via mail.

We really needed to have a way that we could let the deliveries still happen. With our Ring, it gave us the ability to communicate to people who come through the door. But Nexkey gave us the ability to give people access and say, “Could you drop it off inside?”

A lot of these delivery folks, as a church, we really liked to get to know them. We let them use the bathroom. We let them use our microwave. So having Nexkey gave us the ability to continue to have that relationship without us physically being here.

Now that we are doing construction, we are here more often, but the construction folks want to start early and we're not open that early. We were able to give the construction foreman a key to access the room that they need to access, to get to the ladder, to get to the roof, to do the work that we want them to do. 

Giving our vendors keys is extremely helpful. That's been really advantageous to use Nexkey. 

Do you think more religious institutions and churches should use a system like Nexkey, and why?

I really want to emphasize how helpful it is as a church. We have a lot of valuable equipment, instruments, heirlooms, those types of things. We have an auditorium. We just upgraded our sound system. There are a lot of things in there we really don't want anybody coming to a meeting to have access to. 

As a church, we want to be open. We want to be available. We want as many groups to use the facility as possible. From our perspective, that brings value to our church. 

Nexkey is really advantageous, being able to distribute keys, to revoke keys, to limit access to keys. I mean, I can give the AA group access to the building and then the room just in a timeframe in which they need. So I don't have to worry about that leader having a key to access the building any other time. 

Finally with Nexkey, we have a record of what room was accessed by whom and when. That record is something that we've never had before. 

And it's very cost-effective I should say. We looked at some other systems, even standalone card keys. But none of them were as robust.

With key cards, we had a trade off. If we wanted something that costs less, we had less functionality. We had to spend more to get the functionality we wanted. And then that meant we had to replace a door. With Nexkey it was very cost-effective. We could retrofit an old door.

We could have all of this technology with Nexkey on a cost monthly basis, with very inexpensive hardware outlay. So all of those things make Nexkey really beneficial for churches. 

Anything else you want to add about your experience with using Nexkey?

Like I said, it was really hard to come up with the biggest advantage, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the deciding factor was how easy it was to deploy. 

Then with Mike (Nexkey’s Field Technician) coming out and doing the installation. I can't praise him enough. He's just really good. He's methodical, he's thinking about how it looks aesthetically.

I really appreciated that. He made it look good, and he made it work well. All of those things were a great bonus. In addition to it being easy to deploy, having somebody like Mike do the installation just made the experience with Nexkey terrific.