Growing ChMS

Overall they are doing alot of neat things and I am looking forward to seeing how they continue to develop the product. They have a clean design that makes it easy to use and quick to set up.

Pros

Recently they have been adding more and more features. Their membership management is at the core, but they have updated the calendar, forms, and giving to be better and more comprehensive within the last year. They have some really powerful features like workflows which allows you to automate some key processes and notifications.

Cons

There are a few features I wish they had, but one overall theme is how I wish that they integrated more closely with their partner software. The company that owns Shelbynext has been blending their different Saas products but there is still a bit of a wall that keeps the integrations from being seamless​. A good example of this is how there are 4 different ways that you can give via different methods on mobile, but none of those apps have all of the features of memberships, group, forms, calendar, and giving in one product. I think that this will probably be fixed over time.

Shelby Membership Module Overview

It's just been good. As with any new system, there is some learning curve but, for the Membership Module, it's been a rather soft curve.

Pros

It's a really solid product overall. The best features are it's ability to easily enter, edit, combine or delete member records. The combining of duplicate records is ESPECIALLY useful. It transfers all information, including giving information, to the chosen record and misses nothing. Again, an excellent tool indeed. Plus, the entire package is just user friendly. It doesn't require indepth instruction to use and find needed information about an individual member, a group or team, and so on. Finally...the email function that allows emailing end of year giving statements is excellent.

Cons

I cannot really identify a significant downside to this software package. It simply does the job in an efficient, easy fashion.

Shelby Next Pros and Cons

Pros

That it is cloud based, love the app and being able to use the software where ever I happen to be working. The overall look of the site is fresh and fairly user friendly. Easy to get around and update profiles. Check In was not an option with V-5 so that has been a nice feature. We love the ability to create forms as well, really has helped us with many events.

Cons

Reports!! Headers, dates, reliability of the data is really poor. V5 gave us way more options for creating and saving reports that are used regularly. The Directory feature needs work as well. Would like the pre-set configurable fields to be more flexible.

Almost Great

Before we migrated to the ShelbyNext Cloud platform, our ministers and staff never had current data and it was always difficult to follow-up so the database was not updated. Now, if the users perform as they should the data is always updated and communication between ministers, staff and members has increased by 100%

Pros

The portability and distributed nature of the cloud database keeps everyone on the team and in the church connected and up to date. There is ongoing enhancement that helps make the product more user friendly. The security of the data and the ongoing updates and the redundant backup process reduces in-house IT staff time.

Cons

The giving reports are not accurate. When you run a demographic of givers from three years ago against current date, the current data is wrong. The program does not look at the dates. We live in a complicated world and we must be able to show through reporting tools how the giving is coming in to the system. Shelbynext does not do this well.

Great Product

Having the ability to access this program without being hardwired to the database has changed everything for us. And the apps make it easy to make changes quickly and easily on the fly. Overall we are so pleased with the capability of all the faucets and Shelby Next.

Pros

We have a big church and have thousands of congregants - Shelby has allowed us to create a more personal portfolio for each of them. It's hard to know them all individually - but shelby has helped us disciple to each of them on a level that meets them where they are - because we can in real-time track their attendance, giving, small groups, classes and their prayer requests. It's revolutionized our congregational care - among many other wonderful ways it's served our church.

Cons

I don't work with the financial part of the program - but I do know there were some crossover issues from the old Shelby that made the integration challenging. Although, once it was completed, it's worked seamlessly.