Blackbaud Church Management software is designed to connect all staff and volunteers with one holistic view, automated processes and easy-to-use software to manage all your programs , and provide data to better understand congregants and the various ways they interact with your house of worship with a single source of data, and finally keep church membership engaged with multi-channel communications.
N/A
Pushpay
Score 6.4 out of 10
N/A
Pushpay delivers digital solutions to help churches achieve their missions. Their ChurchStaq, ParishStaq, and Resi Media suites aim to simplify engagement, giving, administration, and video streaming—enabling their 14,500+ customers to increase generosity, drive participation, and build stronger community relationships.
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.
As the fees are incredibly high, I would not recommend smaller organizations with lower budgets. If an organization is looking to separate their electronic giving processing outside of their church management software to allow a consistent user experience regardless of a change from one church management platform to another, Pushpay is a great solution.
Cannot give to more than one fund in a single transaction.
Cannot pull data from the church management software. Therefore, if donors give electronically and via cash or check (which is processed directly in Church management software), the donor cannot run one giving statement through Pushpay, which includes all of their gifts. Pushpay does allow check and cash scanning through their platform which can resolve the statement issue, however, they do not have image scanning software, therefore, a visual copy of checks or cash envelopes cannot be exported or retrieved.
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.
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.
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.
Pushpay served as a fine giving platform and allowed for our church to move digitally well.
However, the inordinate fees and costs of their platform ate away at much too large of our donations. With the other platforms out there, it doesn't make sense for us to lock into contracts with excessively high fees.
