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.

Great for some, not for us!

We stopped using Shelby about 4 years ago as it was not meeting our needs as we grew as a church. It overall ended up not being a good fit for us. I'm sure it's evolved since then, however, we found quirks all over the place that didn't fit what we needed.

Pros

Shelby Membership helped us track all of our volunteers and church members. We could run reports and keep track of volunteer teams.

Cons

While we could run reports, we weren't able to get custom things that we needed to be able to track volunteers and schedule volunteers for serving. There were many other things that our staff got frustrated that Shelby couldn't do to help with day to day task that we needed. The overall look and use of Shelby wasn't super user friendly either.

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 Organization Tool

I enjoy having all the features in Shelby Next for groups, and for sending texts to specific groups as reminders, etc. Our church still likes to print a directory for our older members, and I'm glad I can still do that through Shelby Next for them. Shelby Next is more user friendly than other software I've seen, which is a big help in training new leaders who might be resistant or a bit apprehensive about using technology.

Pros

It has really helped me organize our church membership data. It's become a great tool for our leadership to use as far as Interactions and keeping membership information handy for our leaders who are on the go. They really utilize the directory in the Shelby Next app for reaching members and checking on them during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cons

I would like to see more updates in the mass contact portion of the software. Being able to insert and use graphics more easily in email templates would be a great help.