Just hope everyone is ok - Church management ending

Jennifer Dever

Received the email from Blackbaud this morning. I imagine everyone else is panicking like we are. We are currently shopping around for options, so if anyone talks to someone or has promising leads, please share them. Have about 15 meetings set up in the next 48 hrs and would love feedback from any meetings any other groups are having.

Jama Toung 2

@Jennifer Dever I didn't get the email and cannot find this news online. Can you share more?

Jennifer Dever

@Jama Toung Here is the link to the information from Blackbaud:

Arif Mamdani

@Jennifer Dever

Most of what I have to say about this isn't utterable in polite company.

Best as I can tell, we have about a year to make the transition to something else, and I would be very interested to hear what you and others learn as you're evaluating options.

let's keep each other in the loop as we figure our way through this?

LeighAnna Morris

@Jennifer Dever

A while back we made the decision to transition our church management away from Blackbaud beginning Jan 2023. We moved our accounting to QBO the beginning of this year. We needed to be able to get cash basis reporting without a work around as well as we have not been pleased with the amount of things they said they could and couldn't. We will be moving to Planning Center, which is incredibly user friendly and scales to the organization size you have. The church I attend (I work for a different one) uses it and I have seen and heard nothing but great things about it from all the staff. If you look them up you can see the various videos for each section that show what each section can do, and all integrate seamlessly. You don't have to pay for the sections you don't need. You can also begin playing around in it for free as each section has a free option up to so many transactions or people, the People part is always free. I hope you all find something that works for you. I am excited about our transition, and since we have older employees and members I think it will be easier for them to use even with how well designed and easy it is, which will ultimately make my job easier as well.

Janis Worley

@Jennifer Dever
Can't say I'm totally surprised - BB has been ignoring the Church Management community for some time now, making changes we didn't ask for, and not acting on the ones we have been repeatedly asking for. I don't even know what other options are out there right now, so I would love to hear from others if you find a solution to recommend. I certainly didn't need this program search to be added to my workload right now that's for sure!

Dan HoutReilly

@Jennifer Dever We thankfully signed our renewal last month, but who knows when the support will actually end. We will be exploring all our options. If any one finds a software/vendor that meets their needs, please share!

Alicia Adams

@Jennifer Dever

This shocked our organization as well. We made the jump to Blackbaud because of it's fully integrated Accounting / Church Management Platform. Now, we are questioning if it's worth it to hold onto FE without the benefit of that integration. I'm beyond disheartened to be considering starting again from scratch with a software conversion. I'm curious as well to know where people end up and what they do for the accounting piece as well.

Josh Heath

Along with @Janis Worley, I am not totally surprised. The signs have been on the wall, but it still felt like a gut punch when I saw it this morning. We have invested so much time and energy attempting to “partner” with BB to make church management the best ChMS on the market. We have been on church management since day one and experienced all the growing pains early on, but we kept grinding.

What I have to remember is God knew this was coming. He is going to give us the church management technology we need to advance His kingdom for His glory.

Doreen Hughes

@Josh Heath Amen ?

Gary Mayer

@Jennifer Dever
I spent about 2 hours this morning going through the Breeze demo with system access. FWIW, It is pretty good. It seems to have the things we are using (although we tend to limit our use to mostly contacts, events and gifts) and their documentation was quite good. I used their chat support and they were quick to answer and were able to point me to meaningful links that answered the questions. The only thing I found that was disappointing was adding multiple users from the same family since the same data had to be added multiple times. Interestingly, they provide an export/import from a spreadsheet that updates the database so mass changes are pretty nice.

If anyone else does a run-through, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Tara Cain

@Gary Mayer This is helpful, thank you. We are also concerned with transitioning our congregation to a new app and online payment vendor so soon after introducing and onboarding people to BBMS and the Congregant Portal.

Chris Trull

@LeighAnna Morris
What did you do about your online giving when you changed to Planning Center?

Chris Trull

@Tara Cain
That is the same issue that concerns me as well. We are just now getting our members to transition to online giving and are comfortable with it.

Janis Worley

@Alicia Adams We've used Quickbooks Desktop from the start - our financial board consisted of accountants that were comfortable with the software and preferred that versus whatever BB would offer. The BB church management system tracked giving by person, so there isn't much interface between the two except at month end. We track giving by fund, so I have to do a little spreadsheet work to divvy up our BBMS deposits into funds to enter into QB. But otherwise having a separate system hasn't been a problem. My question is, will we need to transfer online payment processors too? For those that have looked at other options, do they come with the online payment processing?

Gary Mayer

@Tara Cain
I understand. We've been through 3 merchants since we started CMS. It's embarrassing but doable. There is the ability to create “self-service” access to Breeze similar to the Blackbaud portal as near as I can figure at this time. Your comment inspired me to check it out. Here is a link to how to do it.

Gary Mayer

@Janis Worley
I'm not trying to “push” Breeze, but that's what I've looked at so far. Here is there processing information.

LeighAnna Morris

@Chris Trull

Planning Center allows for online giving, I actually text my gift to my church each time I get paid, you can do that once you set up an account. You can set up an account by using a form that goes on your website or app or both, they use Stripe as the payment method and it allows the donor to choose if they want to pay the fees as well. The lady that processes the payments at my church said that it is very easy when she goes to reconcile as well. I have been playing around with the Giving piece of it and it seems great. As far as the accounting piece it can integrate with QBO.

Julianne McKeel

@Janis Worley
We use QB desktop too as our GL and have continued to use Acceptiva for our online giving which has great reports with every piece of info needed including fund names. We enter the gifts manually in BB gift records and even though that sounds tedious, it's become rote; it's proven to be a saving grace for not having some of the problems with BB interfaces. I appreciate reading all of the investigation everyone has already done in searching for best software for churches. We are considering ACS which is what we used before Seraphim/Blackbaud, but are open to all possibilities and want to make sure the ones that sound promising understand church pledging and statement needs.

Julianne McKeel

@LeighAnna Morris
Planning Center sounded good when we looked into it a couple of years ago but not for pledges. Here's an email chat I had that I never had time to follow up on at the time. Do you know if they have added a lot of features in the last few years and deal with pledges well?

From: Planning Center Giving [mailto:support@pcogiving.zendesk.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 31, 2019 2:40 PM
To: julianne <jcmckeel@verizon.net>
Subject: [Planning Center Support] Re: Our church asks members to make a pledge indicatin...

## Please do not write below this line ##

Brandon Berg (Giving) Dec 31, 11:39 AM PST Hi julianne, Great question. At this time, Giving doesn't offer a way to track pledges. We have gotten a good number of requests for this feature, so we may add this feature in light of that, but we're not quite there yet. I'd be happy to pass this email along to our Giving team as a feature request though! Brandon Berg Customer Support Online Documentation | Planning Center Blog

David Breeding

My condolences to my fellow Blackbaud customers who will be looking for a new ChMS provider. My contact at Blackbaud (Cooper West) told me yesterday that we can bail at any time, or even renew for a year and then still bail at any time during that year -- Blackbaud will let us out of our contract when we say it is time. What a relief.

Here's a link to a great ChMS feature matrix (2021) by Ministry Business Services, Inc.: https://www.mbsinc.com/church-donor-management-software-chms/
Scroll down towards the bottom of the page to find the famous chart. Some ChMS vendors are not on this list because they failed to respond to the 20-minute MBS, Inc. survey. Their loss...

Josh Heath

@David Breeding This is good to know. I have been concerned about what this will cost us financially to change ChMS vendors - administrative hours on payroll, setup charges for a new software system, overlap of contract costs of two systems (Blackbaud and the new system), replacing equipment that is not compatible with the new system (check scanner, label maker), perhaps other financial costs I have not thought about.

This provides some relief. Thank you for sharing.

LeighAnna Morris

@Julianne McKeel
Pledging is a new thing they have added, I am not sure how long ago, though. I have actually been playing around with it the last couple of months. It can provide reports on how much of what was pledged has actually been received overall throughout the pledging period as well. You can set the amount of what you need in pledges and so on. If you go to the giving section of PC they have a video of what all it can do, and it mentions pledging in that I believe, if not it was easy enough to research before we decided to make the switch over to determine if the pledging process they have would work for us. We have a pledge campaign every year for our operating budget, and that was a very necessary feature for us as well.

Julianne McKeel

@LeighAnna Morris
Thank you so much LeighAnna!

Phillip Kinson

@Josh Heath
Hi Josh, this is Phillip with NTCC. We also have been with Blackbaud since EAP, and just returning from a Conference to have to deal with this. If you could, please let me know what direction you think you may be going.

Josh Heath

Hey @Phillip Kinson, I am still processing all of this, but I have started looking into other church management systems. I am going to join the Breeze webinar tomorrow. I've been impressed with Planning Center so far. It came down to Seraphim and Church Community Builder last time, so I plan to look at CCB again.

I received a call from someone with Blackbaud. I haven't had a chance to return the call, but I plan to call back as soon as possible. I would hope that each of their current BBCM customers will receive a similar call if you have not already.

Scott Holthaus

@Alicia Adams one option for a platform that includes Church Management and Accounting is Shelby Systems:

Janis Worley

@Josh Heath I wasn't able to attend, but did get the link. What did you think of the Breeze system in comparison to BB? ?

Lily Boda

Good morning all,

We have also been searching the same as you all. We have looked at Subsplash since we use them for app and website. We have also looked at Onechurch. One of the features we are not seeing in many of these is the prayer wall like BB has. Are there any platforms that have the prayer wall feature along with many of the other features?

Thank you for your help.

Josh Heath

@Janis Worley The pros are simplicity and price. They were thinking about small to mid-size churches when they developed the software, but their website says churches of all sizes can use it. I felt like if you strip a church management system down to its bare bones, that's what you have with Breeze.

There are a lot of other systems out there that offer what I hoped BB would get to (Push Pay, Planning Center, Touch Point). We left ACS five years ago, and I have been pleasantly surprised with Realm and the changes that have been made since then.

With all the variety out there, it looks to me like choosing a ChMS is unique to the individual church, based on their needs, culture, and budget.

Kristin Spacek

We are also exploring similar options to all of you (Breeze, Planning Ctr & PushPay). Our giving is currently through PushPay who merged with Church Community Builder (CCB) as their ChMS piece. Has anyone looked into CCB in the past or are looking into PushPay now? Would love any reviews or thoughts! I have had calls with all 3 products this week. As Josh said…Breeze is your basic ChMS and cheapest. I am a little concerned about a lot of us trying to onboard at once and what they can handle. They are missing a few pieces we currently use, but we could possibly live without. Planning Center is your tried and true product…that will charge you for every user, room, service, donation, etc. I am concerned as we grow, what our cost will become. And they do not have people you can talk to easily. For us churches without tech support on site, that's kind of scary. PushPay seems to be promising, but I feel like it's my most unknown. Thanks for everyone's posts!! Helps me realize I am not alone in this chaos. ?