The perspective behind ChoirManagement.com — and the experience that shaped it.
My name is Chris Mills. I have spent most of my working life at the intersection of business, technology and people — running my own companies, working in the corporate world, and serving on committees and boards in various capacities. I have been President of two different organisations, served as a Councillor at my local City Council, and accumulated a working knowledge of governance, committee structures and organisational procedure that I suspect most people would consider unusual for someone whose other great passion is choral singing.
That combination — governance experience on one side, a genuine life in music on the other — is really what ChoirManagement.com is built on.
I am a trained singer, having studied to LTCL level through Trinity College London, and a pianist. Over the years I have sung in several choirs, taught singing at an individual level, and worked with two school choirs. I know what it feels like to be a chorister — the commitment required, the preparation expected, and the quiet frustration when the organisation around the singing does not match the quality of the music itself.
For the past decade I have served as Tech Manager for my current choir — a large community ensemble — and that role has given me a ground-level view of the administrative challenges that most choirs face and very few talk about openly.
"Joining a choir should be enjoyable. The focus should be on singing — but that can only happen if the choir is being run properly."
Community choirs are remarkable organisations. They are run almost entirely by volunteers — people who give their evenings, their weekends and a surprising amount of their personal energy to keep an ensemble functioning. Most of them do it because they love music and they love their choir. Very few of them signed up to spend hours transcribing attendance spreadsheets, chasing replies buried in email threads, or trying to locate a score that was definitely shared somewhere but nobody can remember where.
The administrative burden on choir committees has grown considerably in recent years. Choristers' expectations have risen — reasonably so — at exactly the moment when the tools available to manage those expectations have multiplied into a confusing landscape of apps, platforms and workarounds that rarely work together. And all of this is happening in organisations that typically operate on modest budgets, with volunteers who are, like everyone else, increasingly time poor.
Trained singer to LTCL level, Trinity College London. Pianist. Choral singer, singing teacher, and school choir director across several ensembles.
President of two organisations. City Councillor. Committee member across multiple bodies — with a detailed working knowledge of governance and procedure.
Tech Manager for a large community choir for over a decade. Long-standing interest in how technology can improve organisational life without overwhelming the people it is supposed to help.
Founder and director of multiple businesses. Corporate background in marketing. A career spent understanding what organisations need to function well — and what gets in the way.
ChoirManagement.com exists to give choir leaders, committee members and administrators honest, practical guidance on the things that make choirs difficult to run — communication, attendance, music distribution, committee workflows and the technology decisions that sit behind all of them.
It is not a software sales site. It is not written for music industry professionals or choir academics. It is written for the people who stay behind after rehearsal to sort out the seating plan, who field the WhatsApp messages on a Sunday morning, and who spend their own time trying to make sure everyone else has a good experience.
Those people deserve better tools, clearer thinking and more honest advice than they usually get. That is what I am trying to provide here — drawing on everything I have learned from both sides of the conductor's podium, and from years of watching what works and what quietly doesn't in the organisations I have been part of.
The technology to run a choir well — affordably, efficiently and in a way that respects the time of everyone involved — exists. It is simply a matter of knowing where to look and what questions to ask. I hope this site helps with both.
— Chris Mills, ChoirManagement.com