Just hope everyone is ok - Church management ending

@Josh Heath We thankfully never switched to Blackbaud but stayed with ACS. ACS has now bought Ministry Smart and is recommending it to us as a better solution for us than Realm. Supposedly our data would port easily to it because of the relationship with ACS. Anyone familiar with this?

We are starting to look closer at Realm and Breeze after sitting through multiple demos of other options. Anybody else narrow it down to those two, and if so, what made you pick the one you did? We use Quickbooks so we don't need a lot of financial pieces other than contributions.

I try to be pretty “vendor neutral” in the way we help our clients evaluate software choices, so I won't name any candidate names here, but I thought I might list a few things that will be important for you to consider as you evaluate other candidates:

• First - as you look at the future candidates, think down the road a bit. Most churches tend to make a switch in ChMS every 5-7 years or so. Needs change, features change, and other options come and go from the market. How does the candidate handle exporting your data? Some key things you'll need down the road:
  • Ideally they can export a .bak file with all the tables in your database. If they can't, can you get at the tables via whatever report tool they do have?
  • Under the hood, databases are made up of a bunch of related tables (think - a bunch of different spreadsheets). You'll have a table for people, a table for groups, a table for events, etc. That's simplifying it a bit - but each of those tables has a bunch of fields and uses “key IDs” to relate to other tables. For example, the “Bob” record is a table. Bob has a “member ID” of 123. He's also a member of the “Tomato” family, and that family has a “family ID of 567. All of the members of the Tomato family will have a field in their profile that links them to family ID 567. Make sure that the system can export your data with all the ”key IDs" for the data you need. Key IDs are critical for being able to put the data back together again in your future software.
• A source of frustration for some Blackbaud clients has been that Groups, Classes, and Volunteers were separate database entities, with different functions. Suppose you need have small groups that need to be able to check-in instead of using a the small group app for attendance, or Sunday classes that function like a small group but fall under your classes program. As you look at your candidates, make sure that the software treats groups, classes, and volunteers with the flexibility to match your programming needs.
• Attendance reporting is a big deal - does the application you are evaluating give you the ability to group your attendance reports in a way that makes sense, and format the data you present in the way that you need to see it? Can the report include data from groups, classes, and volunteering in one dashboard or report, or does it require generating different reports for each category? Are you able to show the values week over week, year over year? Can you drill in to see individual members listed or are you limited to headcounts.
• Can you easily communicate with people in the way that you need to - for example - can you send an email or text to all elementary Sunday school teachers based on a search for anyone with the role of “teacher” in a class in the “elementary Sunday school" program category? Or does the system require you to keep a separate group of people to manage those lists.

These are just a few things that we've observed with our Blackbaud clients. I hope they help you think about what you need going forward. Please don't hesitate to reach out if we can be of help to you!

After shopping ChMS systems for the last four months, we decided to go with TouchPoint. I am very impressed with the system, and their team has been great to work with so far.

We have not decided on a giving processor, but we are strongly considering MyWell. Has anyone had experience with MyWell, and would you mind sharing your thoughts?

Now we are starting the process of creating an export to send to TouchPoint, which I am very nervous about. The documentation that Blackbaud has provided does not go into much detail, and it appears to be very overwhelming. Has anyone that is not going to Breeze had luck with a full data export? Are their any tricks or shortcuts?

By the way, we engaged with Enable Ministry Partners to help us find the right system for us, and it was well worth the investment. Elliott was excellent to work with, and he knows this industry!

@Josh Heath we were also looking into Touchpoint but I think we are now leaning towards Realm. We really like the way Realm tracks family connections, similar to Church Management. I was disappointed to not have access to a sandbox with Touchpoint so there were a lot of unknowns. You will have to keep us posted as you go through the conversion. I hope it goes well for you.

Has anyone chosen Realm? What has your experience been like?

@Diana Mergen We are stuck between Breeze and Realm right now. Neither one checks all the boxes for us, and each has things that are appealing that the other doesn't. So we are giving it a minute and focusing on making sure our BB data is a clean and ready to go, then we are going back to give them a second look. This has not been an easy process, especially trying to do it as we go through the major church holidays too.

We have decided to move our parish info to ParishStaq. Have any other churches migrated their data from Blackbaud to ParishStaq (or ChurchStaq)? Curious how the process went.

@Diana Mergen we are going with Realm. Elliott Wood with Enable was very helpful with knowing what questions to ask, and just helping us think through what we need for the way we function while letting us come to our own decision. At the end of the day Realm seems to be the best fit, though I don't expect it to be perfect. Our rep, Jenna, has been phenomenal and I have enjoyed working with her. We are about to start the implementation process so I can let everyone know how that goes.

@Diana Mergen For what it's worth, I like the way TouchPoint handles out of household relationships. You can link one family to another family one time, and it is viewable for all family members. Then you can make a note to specify how they are related. I found BB's way of linking the families to be very cumbersome since you had to link individual people together, and that was time consuming if you wanted to capture each relationship. But it's a matter of preference and what works best for you and your church.

@Dan HoutReilly We have also decided to go with ACS Realm and Realm Accounting. We are in the beginning stages of the transition, but it makes sense for us to convert the data prior to training. This is in contrast to Blackbaud's MO, which had us training for weeks before we had access to our own data, and therefore could not immediately implement our training.

Online giving is certainly a challenge and it is difficult to transition smoothly. Since there will be several weeks where we cannot enter new data into our current system, we may be forced to manually enter the contributions that come in during that time into Realm. Not relishing the thought, and we are going to talk to Vanco (Realm's payment vendor) to get their recommendations for transitioning.

@Tara Cain how did your conversion go with Realm? We are in the process now and they are having issues. Just curious how it's going for others.

@Jennifer Dever
We have decided to go with Realm. We want to make sure the accounting and the giving records are in order so that when we merge them together, we have minimal issues. We are aware that some giving will most like have to be entered into realm after the migration….but has anyone set steps to help navigate through this?

Good afternoon everyone - I've been working with several of you to move out of Blackbaud and I know one of the struggles many of you are facing is “how do I get good exports from Blackbaud.” I can't give away our entire process, but I did want to share some screenshots and tips of exports that I've found helpful in my projects. I hope this is helpful to you!

Blackbaud ChMS Exports Guide.pdf

@Janis Worley It's been a while since I had a client on Breeze. It's a nice product, but here's the issue I have with it. Breeze was purchased by Tithe.ly a couple of years ago. They also purchased another product called Elvanto a couple of years ago. Around that same time they had started to build their own ChMS, Tithely ChMS, on top of their giving platform. So, at this point, Tithe.ly has 3 products under their corporate umbrella and is still very unclear on what they plan to do with those products, and how they will be positioned going forward. It doesn't make good business sense for them to maintain 3 different products that do basically the same thing.

So, that has to be a consideration for anyone looking at Breeze.