ChMS

Comprehensive and Contemporary

Commentaires : Very good experience. We have been blessed by their software. It helps us in guest follow up. We have benefited from the forms and website integration as well as the LEAD app. Customer service has always been good at follow up. The technical training videos and help sheets on their help site have been very helpful.

Avantages :

Here is a list of the pros: 1. The software is robust. It is comprehensive in its data search and storage capabilities. 2. The software is evolving. CCB is constantly updating and improving upon the software and app. 3. There is an app that allows us to search our congregant information and follow up on processes. 4. The software was transformational to our assimilation guest ministry process. Not only did they send me a +1 gift for checking out the software, but that book, Fusion by Nelson Searcy changed our church's guest ministry process. It fits perfectly with what CCB offers in terms of process queues and data functionality. 5. We can do forms right in the software that we can upload to our website. This allows guests, members, regular attenders to complete signups, ministry applications, and registrations without ever having to write on a piece of paper. Follow up is very simple. 6. Customer service is excellent. There are a number of technical sheets and training videos on their help site. Very good.

Inconvénients :

Here are some of the cons: 1. The software is so robust you almost need a dedicated position to create calendars, forms, searches, processes, keep the database clean (people who leave, etc...), and train people on how to use it. 2. The software does not do schedules like Planning Center does (not as user friendly and it doesn't connect with Songselect). Honestly, it seems like Planning Center and CCB are competing. While Planning Center does schedules better, CCB does everything else better (my opinion). Our church uses both. We would switch from Planning Center if CCB did schedules better. 3. The checkin portion of CCB, while easy to use, especially with the app, is not as easy to setup. For example, we use both ipads and Citizen Bluetooth printers as well as PCs and Zebra USB printers. They each have different challenges and can be technical to set up. 4. I wish there was a way to integrate our church app with CCB. We would like to do geofence checkin and mobile bar code checkin.

My Review

Avantages :

donor management, online giving, and forms.

Inconvénients :

lack of options to customize options on profile and various parts of the chms.

Probably a great ChMS 10 years ago

Avantages :

CCB is a beefy, feature-rich software that allows you to do almost everything that you might want to, from an administrative perspective, for your church.

Inconvénients :

The main problem with this software is that while many updates are released, it feels like a software that has been piled up for a long time rather than thoughtfully integrated. As a result even the simplest tasks are often convoluted, taking triple the number of mouse clicks than they should. Just one example: editing profiles is cumbersome, finding information about a person requires multiple clicks through their profile information, and adding people requires a process that is more than simply filling out a simple page (you have to create a person, then find that person again from the list, then click into their profile, click to edit their password, and click "send password reset email" in order for them to receive a welcome email). Their sales page looks fantastic, and the software at least LOOKS good when you log in, but whenever you try to do something basic, while it's definitely possible, the whole time you're trying to do something you're left thinking "should it be this complicated"? Probably our biggest disappointment is that congregational engagement, which was a huge sales point, is virtually nonexistent. Because people cannot find other people and communicate easily (because it is cumbersome) with other people, they never log in to use the software. Even our leaders with full permissions would rather copy/paste email addresses into their own email software and communicate via email (or text message) than use this as a communication tool.

Backbone of our Data Management and Communication

Commentaires : Before we went with CCB, we had another Church Management Software System that was extremely popular. One day our man computer died that had the ChMS on it and we were unable to professionally retrieve the data that we had put in it for 20 years. Plus the backup for that ChMS had mistakenly been backing up the wrong file off site. So we lost everything. We went with Church Community Builder because it was cloud based and could be used on any system or smart phone connected to the internet and no chance of loss of data. We got SO MUCH MORE than we had planned. CCB is so robust and they are working daily making it even more robust and user friendly. Their customer support is second to none. It is very personal and they work until you are completely satisfied and understand what is happening. CCB has not become interwoven in every area of our church and being used by all the different ministries for scheduling volunteers, by al the small groups for communication and planning, for our families with children to check in both in the nursery and children's ministry, and by the church staff to not only record all the financial and member data, but to use it to make unlimited reports and planning ideas. It has become our communication hub of the church. Our members love being able to log on and control their own data, download financial information, look at the calendar, connect with other members and groups, and be informed about life at the church. This has been a win!

Avantages :

CCB ties everything we are trying to track, retain, and utilize into one very cohesive product. While there are multiple sections where data points can be collected, you only have to put them in once and they are available throughout the program. Although recording the data is easy, the CCB program helps tremendously to sort and use the data for an unlimited amount of projects and the presentation of the relevant data is very useful. Actually, the CCB Program inspires you with many ways you can use your data that you didn't even think was possible. Plus, it helps us to communicate with all of our attenders in multiple and meaningful ways.

Inconvénients :

In the past, the mobile side of the software was lacking in usability. However, CCB has really poured a lot of resources in the mobile side over the past 2 years and now it is very usable and graphic.

Good all-in-one solution ChMS for our church

Commentaires : Using ChMS we are able to manage volunteers, and members, communicate with groups of people, check-in kids, handle giving, and more from a single portal. Overall while we have had issues, it has been the best fit for our church.

Avantages :

There are some powerful tools built in, and an all-in-one solution means fewer additional vendors to work with. Once trained most staff using the software can navigate the basics and even some advanced features without issue.

Inconvénients :

Bugs, they've been many for us in the past two years. I believe that is in part due to the speed at which they are providing new features, but breaking things that have been reliable for years and then taking months to resolve many of the bugs has been painful.

Love CCB

Avantages :

Church Community Builder is an amazing product for any Church that wants to plan for the future and help support their congregation in the best way possible. It has functions for everything a church would want to do. They are also open to suggestions and always making improvements.

Inconvénients :

Their form builder and service function aren't quite as good as other programs like Planning Centre and Wufoo. But they have made huge improvements over the past years and are getting close!

Great Way To Build Community

Avantages :

What I love about CCB is the ease of locating contacts in the database and being able to see my volunteer duties easily.

Inconvénients :

The software does frequent updates and makes changes often. While this is helpful in working out glitches, it’s difficult to learn navigating through the website or teaching others to do the same.

The Heartbeat of our Church

Commentaires : We have been using ChMS for 15 years. There is no other platform available that would necessitate us moving to something else. It is truly the heartbeat of how our staff functions.

Avantages :

All in one system that handles our most critical needs. From donor management to child checkin, we use ChMS every day.

Inconvénients :

Currently there is a weakness in managing paid events. We have to supplement ChMS with a second event management platform for paid registrations (ChMS works amazing for free stuff).

It works well

Commentaires : Helpful

Avantages :

It is well organized and easily accessible.

Inconvénients :

I would have like more ways in which to print lists of names.The program does not recognize strange characters like é

Love using

Commentaires : Great

Avantages :

Very user friendly and we are able to use various facets of the product.

Inconvénients :

The only thing I can think of is if we can use it on an app but pay the same price.

Great Capabilities

Commentaires : We have been using this ChMS for 13 years. The product improvements have been continuous and valuable. We use and love forms, it would be beneficial for forms to be more robust. It would be great to have conditional actions depending on the answer to a question. The ability to control format would also be nice.

Avantages :

The ability to have all information about our people in one place is so valuable.

Inconvénients :

The display of data after a search does not include all fields in the database. I know this capability is in process.

A great overall product that is absolutely necessary for our church.

Commentaires : In my opinion, Church Community Builder is the best church management software out there. It allows you to be able to track all of data points you need, has a great event management system, a great volunteer scheduling system, a build in business intelligence system (called Metrics), and a unique system for managing manual processes. It does everything that you'd expect and more.

Avantages :

Church Community Builder has a bunch of great features that I could list out 1 by 1, but if I had to pick what I like most about the software, it's their commitment to updates. The release a new update every 8 weeks. Sometimes the updates are bug fixes, which you expect a software company to release, but often they are new features. It's this persistence in bettering their product, that has given me the most confidence in the company. I know they are working on the features that their customers want.

Inconvénients :

The things that I like least about the software is the lack of support for custom branding and reporting. Our church has worked hard on branding and Church Community Builder (CCB) doesn't support it much. The CCB portal is plain grey in color. You can choose custom color themes, but they are preset color themes, not user-defined. Also, they have a feature that allows you to send mass emails out and at the bottom of the email there is the CCB name and logo. It can be confusing to people that don't know what CCB is. They see an email, then see it's coming from CCB. As far as the reporting goes, it's pretty much been the same for several years. You can create custom reports that allow you to search on very specific criteria, which is great. The downside is, you can't always display the results of that criteria in the viewable report. You'll be able to see which people met the criteria, but not be able to see the actual data point. Most of their reports allow you do see the criteria, but a few important ones you can't (most notably the process queues and individual notes). CCB does have some built-in system reports that allow you to view some of the data you can't view in the custom reports, but you can't edit those reports to allow you to add other data points.

Great Cloud Based Database (plus more!) software for Churches

Avantages :

We like the groups feature and how easy it is to message group members, keep their information up to date, the opportunity for group members to connect with each other, love the forms and automation that are available in the software. We love the giving feature and ease of use for our church to set up automatic giving and pledges. The software is great for ministry leaders whether volunteer or paid. Fast customer service when needed. We love the support of launching our church into using it. We paid for the coaching which we would recommend to EVERYONE in order to utilize it successfully. our coach, rocked.The process queue feature is so helpful in keeping track of where people are in a certain process or system of events. Great use for all of it. Loving the app that is being created and constantly updated. There were two other "software companies" we were looking into... but they were either not cost effective for what they offered or their features were hard to understand and operate. We even talked with many other churches using these companies and heard of struggles. Glad we chose CCB.

Inconvénients :

The development of the mobile app is recent over the last 12 to 18 months. We wished it would have been sooner, but they are really doing a good job on improving that and adding features to it constantly. The scheduling feature, which would be the most used, but is the later part of mobil development. CCB is releasing and has realeased it with improvements already. Overall though, CCB is a company for churches and listen to their customers in what they need.

Fantastic church management software, especially for a multisite context

Commentaires : Better management of our church database and processes, with a constantly developing partnership where this company responds to the real needs of its customers.

Avantages :

Where to begin - user interface is so intuitive, seemingly endless ability to customize features, and - more than anything - amazing responsiveness of both customer support and product development to concerns and feature requests. I have truly been amazed by how often CCB churns out new features. It seems within a month or two of us thinking (and occasionally, but not always, mentioning to them), "Gee, I wish I could do THIS in CCB", they will release an update that adds the exact feature we had hoped for. It's very obvious that they are eager to receive feedback from customers, appreciative of the feedback, and then they get to work making their software even more robust to serve the needs of churches of all sizes and structures. We used another big-name church database software before, and CCB has been vastly superior - especially in managing the unique needs of a multisite church. Also, the mobile app that they recently launched is so user-friendly, and they are constantly adding new features and functionality. Kudos to CCB! They truly feel like they are ministering to the church so we can minister better to our congregations and communities, not just trying to make money off churches.

Inconvénients :

There was a bit of a learning curve when on initial setup. It felt a little too wide open to me, until we figured out how best to set things up for our church and got our feet wet a bit. Once I learned more about the way CCB *thinks*, it became very intuitive to expand my use and skills in the program.

It has been an excellent experience moving our church management system to CCB.

Avantages :

I will start with the people. We have had a great experience with the CCB team - our coach who helped us with our rollout over many months, the database team who helped with the migration of data, and the customer support team have all been fantastic. The software itself is very robust with all the features we expected and needed. Our transition to CCB went very smoothly because of the easy-to-use functionality, excellent help videos and documentation, and a great team to help us when we get stuck. I also appreciate that new features are rolled out regularly - this is not a stagnant set of features. They seek feedback from churches to make the software more useful, give us beta releases to test and provide feedback, and then we see the features released in the baseline quickly afterwards. They invest in the future and we are seeing a new look/feel and mobile-friendly approach rolling out. As an example of ease-of use, our children/youth check-in was running well with another application but we wanted our full attendance in CCB. This could have been a difficult sell to our NextGen team, but the features and ease-of-use made it a very straightforward transition. As a point of reference, we are a church of approximately 4,000 attendance each weekend.

Inconvénients :

A few things that are already on their list to improve: - full mobile features - already rolling these out - Improved/Full giving capabilities (app, text-to-give, web, kiosk) so that we don't need a separate vendor/app for this. - Improved reporting - CCB offers lots of canned reports and the ability to build very good custom report but the custom reports are mostly focused around people interactions.

CCB is great for churches of any size

Commentaires : CCB works constantly to improve their products and provides a lot of free training. I have been impressed with the way customer service sends a video to show you how to walk through any steps needed to correct an issue I am having. There is a lot of components involved and they work hard to make it work well together.

Avantages :

Customer service is quick to respond and follows up to make sure your issue has been resolved. They also take note of improvements suggested and act on them. The metrics to track attendance and giving are very easy to adapt to each church's needs. Giving statements are easy to run. The ability to use mail merge and link files is very helpful. Groups are easy to design and allow people to interact easily. New schedules are a huge improvement.

Inconvénients :

The team has worked very hard over the last couple of years to improve the software. Most issues I have had in the past have been resolved. The only issue we have now is that in order to use the serving portion of the software, individuals have to do a lot of date input to get it started. Because we didn't make it a focus of our original log ins, we don't have the date needed to get this portion working well. Wish we could find a work around to get this portion working well for us.

We have used CCB for almost 10 years and have been very happy with our experience.

Avantages :

We appreciate how responsive the team has been to our feedback. We get excellent response time on all tickets submitted, friendly, competent service and have also felt heard anytime we have asked for other features. One of their reps actually proactively reached out to us recently to meet with us and understand our needs better, which they were doing with a number of their customers. This is, of course, in addition to the reliable functionality of the features we use daily in our organization. We use many of the modules and continue to develop more usage within our staff and congregation as I am able to help more of our users become more comfortable with the features. We rely on this tool daily and it allows us to connect to more people in our congregation and community than any other tool we have used or reviewed.

Inconvénients :

There are at times things we wish were more intuitive, such as the user interface for adding events with rooms and resources. We understand the challenge with providing so much complexity and functionality so we are not unhappy with the product. It just means we let only our power users use those areas and do our best to keep them well-trained. We love that we have a voice in shaping the future of the interface and feel CCB is always interested in staying relevant in the market for these types of tools.

Continually Improving

Commentaires : We've used CCB for a couple of years now. Some of the basic processes work great - church directory, finding emails and phone numbers and addresses, etc. Also works great for tracking tithing and giving, as well as letting users print their own year-end-giving tax receipts. For us, it put multiple databases all in one place so that all our members user information is always up to date. The scheduling system is handy. The recent improvements of allowing members to respond to an invitation via text is a huge improvement. Also, the recent relationship with PushPay and eChurch apps is a nice partnering. Now our attendees and give electronically in the services using our church app, and their giving is automatically recording in CCB. This has allowed us to cater to the next gen that doesn't carry cash or checks and still allow them to be able to give. Compared to worshipplanningcenter.com, there are some features still lacking but they are continually making improvements. The site itself isn't completely mobile-friendly yet (forms being the most frustrating feature), but as a church we are very happy with the system.

Avantages :

Database Church directory Volunteer scheduling

Inconvénients :

Mobile-friendliness

Easy to Use software could be enhanced

Commentaires : The overall experience has been good and the things that are challenging we make work. There is more good than bad with CCB.

Avantages :

The software is easy to use and comes with tool such as app features that allow events and attendance tracking for our servant leaders.

Inconvénients :

The software is limited on the customizable features. Running reports is cumbersome and it is hard to get the report you want. Customer service is limited only to the Master Admin and not available to all the users.

Good Program for Churches

Commentaires : We get to keep 99% of our information in one central location. It helps us keep track of people and events. We use it constantly, and will be for the foreseeable future.

Avantages :

There's a lot to do with CCB. Our primary use is for room reservation and volunteer tracking. Reserving rooms and resources is easy, and takes very few steps. It takes a lot to keep track of all the volunteers our church has, and CCB puts them all in one location. We can send out emails to groups, respond to forms instantaneously, and schedule volunteers for duties. Like I said, there is a lot to do on CCB.

Inconvénients :

With there being lots to do, there's a lot to learn. Adequate training is difficult to come by in my organization, most of mine has been playing around with CCB to figure things out. At times it can be slow, and we've found that some of our administrators have lost information over time.

Truly built with churches and discipleship in mind!

Commentaires : Ease of use and powerful reporting

Avantages :

Church Community Builder (CCB) is a power packed data base with the ability to customize and create systems that work best for your individual church. We love that it doesn't have the look or feel of typical database and how user friendly it is. CCB understands the heart of church discipleship is relationships and therefore their product helps to facilitate relationship while maintaining high level data power. We searched through many Church Management Solutions before landing on CCB and have been very pleased over the last 2 + years. I appreciate that they are always looking for ways to improve and value our input to build the best system.

Inconvénients :

There are a couple of reporting features that I wish were a little more robust. As the data guru I still find some frustration with how certain reports are built or why I can't include certain fields or columns when I am building a custom report.

Good program, just needs some extra stuff

Avantages :

Easy layout to get used to, great menu bar, easy to find people/addresses. Taking attendance is easy...sending an email, setting up check in events etc..They do make a lot of things easy to do.

Inconvénients :

The reporting is seriously lacking. Can't do half of the specifics I want that I was able to get in my old system. If I am able to do it, I need to upload to Excel and manipulate the data in order to see my results. Needs updated attendance and financial report abilities. The calendar system is also a process. Wish it had an easier layout, or seperate colors for different things. Just doesn't seem as updated as it could be for what we need it to do.

CCB Review

Commentaires : I use it every day in my job. It makes my job so much easier and I can figure out most things on my own.

Avantages :

CCB is so user friendly. The tech support is also very quick and helpful. Schedules are amazing to use to plan events and positions. It's easy to look up families and information. Groups are also very easy to manage and own. Reports are very helpful and easy to pull and use.

Inconvénients :

The calendar, we ended up using a different software for that. Also, easier way to leave a group.

Comprehensive, accessible, and regularly enhanced

Avantages :

CCB has a clean design with straightforward access to the functions that we use most often in the church office, along with very useful resources for the regular members of the congregation.

Inconvénients :

It's something of a challenge to think of what I like least, as it all works pretty well. The most obvious "con" is that CCB's built-in HTML messaging features are rather limited, requiring us to keep using Constant Contact and other mailing list systems.

I love this product!!!

Avantages :

CCB has been a great program to incorporate many different aspects of church data management into one location like member data, room reservations, forms, event payments and more. I love it and they are always adding new things.

Inconvénients :

The are always adding new functions which means there are certain areas that are not fully developed but even with those, it is an amazing product and they work with their clients to make it even better.