Blackbaud Church Management vs. Pushpay

I believe this system was overpriced and under-supported. From experience, it is very clunky and lacking features that churches would find helpful. There are no scenarios for which Blackbaud Church Management is well suited. It is not appropriate for churches. I would avoid it at all costs. They were also not willing to assist in moving to another system.

Incentivized

Pushpay has been fantastic for us in the implementation of events, especially in the processing of registration forms and collecting fees. Pushpay has also been great in helping us receive donations and contributions to the church. Additionally, I have also used Pushpay (specifically, the CRM database) to help in our process of Church Membership (receiving applications, registering attendance at our membership classes, etc).

• User Friendly
• Secure

Incentivized

• Not geared toward churches
• Missing much functionality
• In my opinion, horrible and incompetent support
• No ongoing support for their system

Incentivized

• Ability to apply multiple discount codes on a single transaction
• Church management software could be more aesthetically pleasing
• Church management software could be slightly more user friendly in the "Process queues"

The access to support is excellent; however, the turnover with assigned account managers has been high over the years, which makes it challenging to build a lasting rapport. There have been some technical and functionality issues communicated over the years which have been received by the account manager. At the time, with responses such as "yes, we know it's an issue, and we're working on that, but we don't have a timeframe." These problems are never resolved, nor are progress reports or follow up ever addressed, then the account manager changes and the cycle starts again.

Incentivized

In my opinion, Blackbaud was by far the worst experience we have had with any church management system. We initially moved away from Shelby Systems to FellowshipOne. In an attempt to consolidate church management and accounting into a single system, we moved from FellowshipOne to Blackbaud Church Management to accomplish this. Both FellowshipOne and Shelby wer far superior systems.

Incentivized

We had previously used a program called eGiving to receive online payments and contributions, and we have previously used PowerChurch as our CRM, and Pushpay (including its Church Community Builder program) far excels both of these other programs. Pushpay is more user-friendly, and its financial program and its CRM program work much more effectively with one another.

• A negative ROI
• Difficulty in moving data to another system
• Caused a lot of extra work to fix all the errors that came in implementation

Incentivized

• Recurring giving schedules allow higher and more consistent electronic giving.
• Time and cost savings with paperless statements.

Incentivized