Blackbaud Church Management vs. TouchPoint Software

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

For our church size (1000 weekly attendees), Touchpoint has been a great option for us. We moved from a legacy server based system to Touchpoint which has brought a much needed transition to a web-based product with all its advantages. The various features that stand out in our use of Touchpoint includes: good child-care check-in process, the integration of volunteer background checks with third party vendors, increasing integration with accounting packages like Sage Intacct, strong contributions module with flexibility on selecting various providers for the front end, generally intuitive ease of use combined with good flexibility to tailor to our needs.

Incentivized

• Connects well with online merchant processors for ACH and Credit card gifts
• Integrates well with our accounting software (Sage Intacct)
• Retreat and event management that require fees is also very robust.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• The onboarding/training process was not as smooth as it could have been.
• As new features roll-out, sometimes the communication is not as clear as it could be.

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 moved from Shelby to Touchpoint 5 years ago. Although Shelby has moved on to the web, it has been a more recent development after a 40 year history as a server based product. We wanted to go with a web-based option that started on the web.

Incentivized

• 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

• Touchpoint's value has been in the ability of staff and lay leaders to be able to connect with and manage others.

Incentivized