We LOVE Church Community Builder

Our old database was clunky and difficult to use. Most of our staff only used it as a directory, and not very often. CCB is very intuitive and easy to use. Our staff is using it daily and a lot of our congregation is using it daily. It allows us to track engagement and spiritual growth. It helps us to have accurate and up to date contact information on our members. We have gotten rid of several stand alone software programs and have save money by doing so. We can communicate better with our members, and everyone can set their communication preferences, so they aren't getting information they don't want to see, but stay connected in the areas they want. Registrations have gotten a LOT easier, especially those with payments. They used to take a lot of admin hours to process, now the system processes them with very little admin interaction. Scheduling volunteers and reminder follow ups is easier and more efficient as well. IT has also allowed us to switch from one admin person entering all calendar events from paper submissions to everyone submitting their own through the system, and the admin only needs to approve the requests-making things more efficient and less admin heavy. We LOVE this software, I am sure I could come up with even more reasons why it would be a good solution for other churches and would be happy to talk to anyone considering switching to CCB.

Pros

This is a very powerful database tool that simplifies the administrative processes, allowing the church team to do ministry better and more efficiently. I love the fact that when I contact them for support the person who contacts me almost always uses it in their own church. They aren't just behind the scenes, they are users and they understand what we are trying to do. I love that they listen to their church partners and are constantly updating things to make them more efficient and easier to use based on feedback from church partners. The coaching sessions are very thorough and very much worth the extra expense. They offer tons of training materials as well as support through support tickets, and even a user community where you can connect with other users for ideas and help working through anything you might be trying to figure out.

Cons

Overall, there really isn't any cons. Sure, there are things we would like to have work a little differently, but we know that the team at CCB listens to all of the church partners and are continually working on different feature enhancements to make things easier and more efficient for their church partners. If I had to suggest something we'd like to see...we would really like it to be a one stop shop for all of our ministry needs-completely replacing PCO and our financial software, and a place to leave private notes on a profile specifically for pastors only to see.

CCB is an excellent software for any church!

My overall experience is excellent. I really do love CCB.

Pros

I really like Church Community Builder because it makes it easy to manage everything in one place. CCB has tons of features, so whatever you are looking for, there is a great chance it does what you are needing. In addition, anytime you need help figuring ANYTHING out, they have AMAZING customer support. I have never, ever felt frustrated when reaching out for help. Any time I ask for help, I get a prompt response from a live person living in Colorado Springs who fully understands the product and is excited to help me understand the product too. Further, if there is something more that you wish CCB did, or if there happens to be an area you see could be improved, they are always open to feedback and new "feature requests" because they want CCB to work for the customer and serve our needs. Just when you think CCB can't get better....it always does! I love CCB.

Cons

The thing I like the least is that sometimes because CCB does do so much, there can be a long learning curve in understanding HOW to do everything. There are some areas of the software I still have never used because I've never taken the time to learn how to use them. However, anytime that I wish to learn, they make it easy by offering video tutorials, or you can submit a support ticket with questions, or they even offer live video training videos you take as a group or at times you can schedule live 1-on-1 video chats where they will walk you through the software. I have taken advantage of all of these services numerous times and have never felt let down.

Comprehensive and Contemporary

Very good experience. We have been blessed by their software. It helps us in guest follow up. We have benefited from the forms and website integration as well as the LEAD app. Customer service has always been good at follow up. The technical training videos and help sheets on their help site have been very helpful.

Pros

Here is a list of the pros:
1. The software is robust. It is comprehensive in its data search and storage capabilities.
2. The software is evolving. CCB is constantly updating and improving upon the software and app.
3. There is an app that allows us to search our congregant information and follow up on processes.
4. The software was transformational to our assimilation guest ministry process. Not only did they send me a +1 gift for checking out the software, but that book, Fusion by Nelson Searcy changed our church's guest ministry process. It fits perfectly with what CCB offers in terms of process queues and data functionality.
5. We can do forms right in the software that we can upload to our website. This allows guests, members, regular attenders to complete signups, ministry applications, and registrations without ever having to write on a piece of paper. Follow up is very simple.
6. Customer service is excellent. There are a number of technical sheets and training videos on their help site. Very good.

Cons

Here are some of the cons:
1. The software is so robust you almost need a dedicated position to create calendars, forms, searches, processes, keep the database clean (people who leave, etc...), and train people on how to use it.
2. The software does not do schedules like Planning Center does (not as user friendly and it doesn't connect with Songselect). Honestly, it seems like Planning Center and CCB are competing. While Planning Center does schedules better, CCB does everything else better (my opinion). Our church uses both. We would switch from Planning Center if CCB did schedules better.
3. The checkin portion of CCB, while easy to use, especially with the app, is not as easy to setup. For example, we use both ipads and Citizen Bluetooth printers as well as PCs and Zebra USB printers. They each have different challenges and can be technical to set up.
4. I wish there was a way to integrate our church app with CCB. We would like to do geofence checkin and mobile bar code checkin.

Church Directory, Follow up Workflow, and more

Church Community Builder was heavily used at my last church and it served three primary purposes for us and it did those things well. 1. Family Directory - Immediate and detailed information on families within the church as well as a confidential notes box to keep updates on contacts and outreaches and involvement within the church to promote spiritual health and church involvement. Mobile access to this directory also made on-the-go contacts nice and easy. 2. Follow-up Workflow Organizer - As a team, we came up with a follow-up system. For example: Week 1 - Phone Call, Week 2 - Postcard, Week 3 - Visit, Week 4 - Enroll in all newsletters applicable. One administrator was then put in charge of building this workflow, who is assigned to each section, and what they've got to do. Once the workflow was made active, as new families are added into the system, they immediately get dropped into the follow-up queue for week 1, the leader in charge of phone calls gets their info as an alert, and is able to mark "COMPLETE" after the phone call is made and info is updated. The workflow continues its cycle through each assigned party until the new family has gone through the full follow-up spectrum. 3. Event Coordination - When an event is decided upon, all details can be built into the CCB Calendar. The administrator​ can title the event, mark its date, time, space requirements, necessary supplies, workers needed, and more. Leaders then took care of their sections and that's it.

Pros

The ability to build a follow-up​ workflow to go to specific people in the process has been monumental for helping us stay in touch with new visitors.
Fully customizable reports and attendance sheets
Confidential notes and information on families for admin eyes only
Notifications and alerts queue for each member in a specific workflow to contact and report on
Ability to create services, programs, special events, and more as well as break down all needs from material to personnel and have lists sent to coordinators, volunteers, or the entire church for the purposes of donation (expanded on below)
Administrators are not the only ones with full access to directory. Any family can access, but won't necessarily have the permissions of an admin

Cons

Not the best option for small churches
Can be a learning curve with it, but plenty of resources available to get the most out of it
A lot of maintenance necessary to keep all information up to date and accurate

It has been an excellent experience moving our church management system to CCB.

Pros

I will start with the people. We have had a great experience with the CCB team - our coach who helped us with our rollout over many months, the database team who helped with the migration of data, and the customer support team have all been fantastic.

The software itself is very robust with all the features we expected and needed. Our transition to CCB went very smoothly because of the easy-to-use functionality, excellent help videos and documentation, and a great team to help us when we get stuck. I also appreciate that new features are rolled out regularly - this is not a stagnant set of features. They seek feedback from churches to make the software more useful, give us beta releases to test and provide feedback, and then we see the features released in the baseline quickly afterwards. They invest in the future and we are seeing a new look/feel and mobile-friendly approach rolling out.

As an example of ease-of use, our children/youth check-in was running well with another application but we wanted our full attendance in CCB. This could have been a difficult sell to our NextGen team, but the features and ease-of-use made it a very straightforward transition.

As a point of reference, we are a church of approximately 4,000 attendance each weekend.

Cons

A few things that are already on their list to improve:
- full mobile features - already rolling these out
- Improved/Full giving capabilities (app, text-to-give, web, kiosk) so that we don't need a separate vendor/app for this.
- Improved reporting - CCB offers lots of canned reports and the ability to build very good custom report but the custom reports are mostly focused around people interactions.

Great Cloud Based Database (plus more!) software for Churches

Pros

We like the groups feature and how easy it is to message group members, keep their information up to date, the opportunity for group members to connect with each other, love the forms and automation that are available in the software. We love the giving feature and ease of use for our church to set up automatic giving and pledges. The software is great for ministry leaders whether volunteer or paid. Fast customer service when needed. We love the support of launching our church into using it. We paid for the coaching which we would recommend to EVERYONE in order to utilize it successfully. our coach, rocked.The process queue feature is so helpful in keeping track of where people are in a certain process or system of events. Great use for all of it. Loving the app that is being created and constantly updated. There were two other "software companies" we were looking into... but they were either not cost effective for what they offered or their features were hard to understand and operate. We even talked with many other churches using these companies and heard of struggles. Glad we chose CCB.

Cons

The development of the mobile app is recent over the last 12 to 18 months. We wished it would have been sooner, but they are really doing a good job on improving that and adding features to it constantly. The scheduling feature, which would be the most used, but is the later part of mobil development. CCB is releasing and has realeased it with improvements already. Overall though, CCB is a company for churches and listen to their customers in what they need.

Fantastic church management software, especially for a multisite context

Better management of our church database and processes, with a constantly developing partnership where this company responds to the real needs of its customers.

Pros

Where to begin - user interface is so intuitive, seemingly endless ability to customize features, and - more than anything - amazing responsiveness of both customer support and product development to concerns and feature requests. I have truly been amazed by how often CCB churns out new features. It seems within a month or two of us thinking (and occasionally, but not always, mentioning to them), "Gee, I wish I could do THIS in CCB", they will release an update that adds the exact feature we had hoped for. It's very obvious that they are eager to receive feedback from customers, appreciative of the feedback, and then they get to work making their software even more robust to serve the needs of churches of all sizes and structures. We used another big-name church database software before, and CCB has been vastly superior - especially in managing the unique needs of a multisite church. Also, the mobile app that they recently launched is so user-friendly, and they are constantly adding new features and functionality. Kudos to CCB! They truly feel like they are ministering to the church so we can minister better to our congregations and communities, not just trying to make money off churches.

Cons

There was a bit of a learning curve when on initial setup. It felt a little too wide open to me, until we figured out how best to set things up for our church and got our feet wet a bit. Once I learned more about the way CCB *thinks*, it became very intuitive to expand my use and skills in the program.

A great overall product that is absolutely necessary for our church.

In my opinion, Church Community Builder is the best church management software out there. It allows you to be able to track all of data points you need, has a great event management system, a great volunteer scheduling system, a build in business intelligence system (called Metrics), and a unique system for managing manual processes. It does everything that you'd expect and more.

Pros

Church Community Builder has a bunch of great features that I could list out 1 by 1, but if I had to pick what I like most about the software, it's their commitment to updates. The release a new update every 8 weeks. Sometimes the updates are bug fixes, which you expect a software company to release, but often they are new features. It's this persistence in bettering their product, that has given me the most confidence in the company. I know they are working on the features that their customers want.

Cons

The things that I like least about the software is the lack of support for custom branding and reporting.

Our church has worked hard on branding and Church Community Builder (CCB) doesn't support it much. The CCB portal is plain grey in color. You can choose custom color themes, but they are preset color themes, not user-defined. Also, they have a feature that allows you to send mass emails out and at the bottom of the email there is the CCB name and logo. It can be confusing to people that don't know what CCB is. They see an email, then see it's coming from CCB.

As far as the reporting goes, it's pretty much been the same for several years. You can create custom reports that allow you to search on very specific criteria, which is great. The downside is, you can't always display the results of that criteria in the viewable report. You'll be able to see which people met the criteria, but not be able to see the actual data point. Most of their reports allow you do see the criteria, but a few important ones you can't (most notably the process queues and individual notes). CCB does have some built-in system reports that allow you to view some of the data you can't view in the custom reports, but you can't edit those reports to allow you to add other data points.

Overall, CCB is a wonderful program! Great for small & big churches!

Easily being connected to other leaders, especially for a church run on volunteers. We are in the church at different parts during the week and don't have the benefit of having our offices filled all week with each other! So it helps with easy communication and connection. Also, for our volunteer church members & their calendars for serving! Having a place for all their information, birthday's, anniversaries, etc is so helpful!

Pros

I love how everything is connected, and once you get knowledgeable about it, it is easy to use! I love how the calendar is connected to our website, how you can have groups of different ministries and send emails to them or texts and it's professional and not from a personal phone. I love overall how there isn't so much for church members to learn how to use it, so it has basic communication and information where they can go on and be connected and informed! Also, their customer service is beyond amazing! They have helped in any and every way, from email responses (even if I'm not understanding something simple) to calling on the phone to walk me through something... They truly have beyond a five star staff!!

Cons

I think there are some things for them to work on, but it's all natural and a part of them moving forward. I, as a user, can detect some things when I try to do something I can't, but being a developer I understand they can't have it all perfect for us! Nothing too big of a con, for someone not to get CCB, but what is great about them is that you can email them ideas or situations you are running into and they will add it to their list of ideas and the team goes over them! I think that's really awesome! A few ideas we've had as a team, mostly for convenience sake, to move forward that could be helpful is:

-When it comes to "Room Requests" having an area for a clean up list, or that if a ministry or person uses a room or resource the steps needed to put things back to the way they should be.

-Another thing being when someone wants to sign up for CCB that there can be a button on the email that you could click "directly add into CCB" or "deny" type thing, so you don't have to re-type/copy everything. OR Maybe if you are an admin, have a notification that someone has signed up, so when you are logged in, you could click "approve" or "deny" just like you do when people want to put something on the calendar, or use a resource, etc.

-Scheduling, that there could be an option to keep re-peat the schedules, because some ministries use the same people! And you could even remove people from it, and replace them, but leave the rest the same.

The Industry Standard for Web Based Church Administration

Church Community Builder allows me to keep track of everything that I need to keep track of in one place. It allows the church to empower each ministry to easily do the administration that's required.

Pros

Church Community Builder is the leader and industry standard for web-based church administration. The software is intuitive and easy to use. I have implemented the software at two churches in which I have worked and helped others get the most out of their subscription.

What I like most about the software is that it is comprehensive. I've seen too many churches build separate and unconnected systems for children's check-in, group sign ups, payments for events and donor records. When these systems don't "speak" to one another, it creates more confusion and work for the church staff.

The goal of church administration is to remove the burden of administration away from the ministry team. They typically excel at being with people and doing the work of the ministry. However, many struggle with administration basics such as keeping track of groups, communication, attendance data, etc. Church community builder allows our staff to be "efficient with things, so we can be effective with people".

Everyone benefits from a centralized system - whether you log in daily or rarely. We always know where we can find the information we need. Saving time makes the churches dollars go farther.

Cons

The mobile computing revolution took place since CCB launches their 2.0 platform. Getting the software to work and interact well with mobile devices has been a slow process, but I'm happy to see the progress that's been made with the Lead App.

Overall, we have had a great experience with CCB. We continue to expand how we use it in ministry.

This software is geared toward church or ministry use. It has been great for searching our database to find individuals who are serving or not, who are connected in a community group or not, or who have not attended recently for follow-up, etc. You can customize many fields to help the software suit your specific reporting needs. Individuals can log in and update their profile, find a group, find a place to serve, give a contribution or register for an upcoming event.

Pros

CCB is web-based therefore it is easily accessed from office, home or anywhere.
There is a small group app that is great for group leaders to make contacts, take attendance, etc.
You can schedule weekly or monthly reports that are sent to your or someone else's email.
The Metrics tool is fantastic.
Default privacy settings can be set pretty tight, but individuals can chose what they want others to see or not see on their profiles.
Sending mail merges or messages is very easy to do.
If someone is logged in, their contact information will auto-fill on forms they are filling out.
There are great help videos & articles by subject that explain how to use the system.
The software has improved over the last 4 years and continues to improve with releases of periodic updates, enhancements and fixes.

Cons

CCB is very complex and can overwhelm some people, especially when setting up queries to find the right people for a saved search.
Forms have to match to records (understandable) but it can take a lot of time for something like VBS which may have hundreds of forms to match to records.
Addresses do not CASS certify so there can be misspellings or incomplete addresses in your data.
It can be hard to get your church on board to use the system, even leadership. Change can always be difficult.
You can't sign up an entire family on a single form. Forms need to be filled out for each individual so it matches to their personal record.