Blackbaud Church Management vs. Twilio

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

Twilio is well suited to sending SMS reminders to prospects on the lead-up to sales appointments. This has helped us improve attendance rates for these meetings. We also use Twilio to communicate with these prospects post-meeting to make offers on products and services and for feedback on their meeting.

Incentivized

• Easy to see my team in one place, when they log in and out and what call status they are in.
• Twilio is a simple, user friendly way to log in and out of work activities.
• Excellent services and support.
• The omnichannel feature which allows agents to get request from all channels.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Authy does not support the "push button" multi-factor authentication from your application's native apps. This means if you want to use Authy, you still need to use TOTP based codes.
• Not really a shortcoming of Authy, but it does nothing to help with multi-factor authentication using text messages - those are still sent to your platform's messaging app.
• Authy doesn't always display how much time is left before your current token expires, making it difficult to know how much time you have left to enter the current code.

Incentivized

We are happy with Twilio because the price per message is low. The API is not difficult to implement and the documentation is very complete. Twilio as a company keeps you well informed of issues that happen. They also offer free online workshops or conferences to make notices of new laws, etc.

Incentivized

Overall the product API is extremely well documented so it is very easy to build a product with their technology. The website is a little bit cumbersome to use as they have greatly expanded the number of products that they have over the years, but the dashboard UI has not been improved much since.

Incentivized

The problem tends to be us, the user, rather than Twilio. We don't reach out to support fast enough (spend time struggling), but when we have, they've solved our issue immediately. We are rural, so there are signal issues to accommodate, however, we find that a few staff on a few cellular networks can triangulate where we all have signal to put up a sign.

Incentivized

Good interface to connect with different API systems for communication through different channel[s]. Twilio has good market coverage of the client across the globe for generating revenue through multi-channel approach. It works with [a] programmable feature that makes life easy for every user. Automated call is one of the advance[d] feature[s] of this tool.

Incentivized

The developer APIs and SDKs are super easy to follow.

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 have looked at some of Twilio competitors, like Infobip, Sich and Bandwith. Prices on all of them for voice minutes and SMS are way cheaper than Twilio. But none of them seem to offer as many features and ease of use as Twilio. Specially from an API point of view

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

• We found that associates who had the opportunity to respond to a survey about their assigned job were 37% more likely to return to a job site
• We were able to reduce the number of resources required to manually respond to associates using Twilio Studio, so those resources could have more time to complete other tasks
• We were able to scale the number of associates who received survey messages at least by a factor of 8 without increasing our resource demand

Incentivized