Church Community Builder Software

I love this program and would highly recommend it to your church or ministry group.

Pros

Church Community Builder offers all of the bells and whistles to track your congregational individual members, families, giving, activities, ministry groups, community groups and more. I love this program and have utilized for adoption and orphan care ministry for many years.

Cons

n/a I don't see any real cons. There's a calendar built-in program, too, which is helping for scheduling church ministry groups and to submit to administration.

This is a replacement for The City by ACS it is very user friendly on all platforms.

Pros

The functionality of this software allows us to have 1 app for the scheduling, conversations, group business, On Line giving, Membership database and more.

Cons

At this point we have not found anything we dislike with this product. The company has been very responsive.

Pros

Church community builder is continually improving efforts making church data management simple. Love layout and all features

Cons

I would love to be able to complete or register multiple people at one time and have an electronic signature feature for forms

Our church has been on CCB for quite a while, and I am not sure if we are fully utilizing all that it is capable of. It has been a great end user experience though!

Pros

CCB has some great features and as a user I feel like I am able to stay in the loop on groups I am in, events I have volunteered to help with, and can fill out forms with detailed questions and submit them back to the church.

Cons

Although keeping track of groups (like major volunteer groups) seems somewhat straightforward, I don't see how keeping track of who is in what smallgroup/lifegroup could be done. Additionally, our church has a hierarchy of leadership to help streamline things, and I don't see how CCB helps us solve this problem.

It's definitely a process to get up and running. We utilized the coaching which helped enormously and benefited our end result.

Pros

It's easy to use and the new mobile app is amazing! The tools for scheduling volunteers and planning events really is helpful.

Overall, it has been a great experience for church

Pros

I love the ability of Church Community Builder to integrate with our current online giving product, and account software.

Cons

At first it was a little difficult to understand how to use, however the support and various training articles are a tremendous aid.

Pros

The product had much potential to help our church get organized. At first, before we signed up, their customer service was excellent. But after we signed up.

Cons

Their customer support is lacking to nonexistent. They agreed to cancel our subscription but haven't cancelled their automatic payment. When I tried to call to request a refund, they've simply given me the runaround but will not give me a solution. They did not prove themselves to be helpful or trustworthy. I had to call my credit card company to block payment

Likes Best

There is nothing I like about this software except that has a nicer user interface. In simple terms, it's pretty.

Likes Least

Customer Service! When you submit a 'ticket' their usual response is "that's a great question".... really? that is no way answers my question.
Ease of use is terrible. Other than our staff, I would estimate that only 15-20% of our church congregation uses this on their own.
Updates = many many software problems. Every time they do an update to fix issues in the software they add nearly as many glitches back into the system.
Server space & speed is extremely poor. When adding rooms to an event, it takes almost 30 minutes for the servers to respond to your request. In the mean time you can not do anything else in CCB except wait for the spinning wheel of death to go away. This greatly effects the efficiency of our team, but their response was that they have more important things to work, so this fix will not happen for some time.

Recommendations

Look at other software options. Planning center has new stuff out. Maybe in a year.... or two, CCB will finally get their act together and have a product worth paying for.

Likes Best

Brings many components of the church operations together in one place.

Customer support is very responsive and timely.

Likes Least

Cannot accommodate debit payments or set-up automatic bank withdrawals with Canadian banks.

VERY steep learning curve -- many of our "older" church staff have simply given up.

Sending emails to the PARENTS of the children in our program requires learning how to use a "mail merge" instead of just an easy click to select to email the parents. This has caused many of our volunteer teachers and program leaders to just opt out of using CCB and, instead, create their own email lists.

Mastering process queues is particularly difficult.

Recommendations

Beware if you are a Canadian Church -- they aren't quite ready for us yet.

Likes Best

CCB has a variety of uses for our church. It is user-friendly, easy to navigate and comprehensive in terms of what it provides.

Likes Least

Reports can be tricky to navigate and, while CCB allows you to automate many of your common processes so that information is tracked and stored correctly, creating the process queues can be confusion.

Recommendations

Make sure you know what you are getting - there are just a few packages that provide similar services, and each has different quirks and strengths. It is not a one-size fits everybody!

Likes Best

It integrates and connects all of the information for our church.

Likes Least

It is difficult to manipulate the product to show what I need.

Recommendations

Make it simpler and more efficient in how stored information can be found and utilized.

Likes Best

I struggle to answer because there's nothing I like

Likes Least

You don't get an immediate response when sending an email.

Recommendations

Keep searching for easier to use software and customer service hours with a live person

Likes Best

Uptime has been great. Additional functions have been added over the years that are useful to church leaders.

Likes Least

It has a non-responsive design. The product is very difficult to use on a mobile phone.

Recommendations

If your people won't use it, it doesn't really work. In our situation, our leaders love the product, but the average end user has a very hard time using the software.

Likes Best

I liked that I could organize families contact info and keep track or their family positions.

Likes Least

It was not user-friendly. We tried to get our church integrated into the system, but it was so difficult for people even to figure out how to set up a username and password that we eventually started using it only as an address book. We were hoping to use this in all aspects of our church, including volunteer sign up and children's ministry check-in. However, we were never able to fully use the program because our congregation could not figure it out. Also, the set up was very frustrating, again it's not very user-friendly. We just recently decided not to renew with CCB, even though it is going to be huge job and very time consuming to re-import all of our contacts into a new database.

Recommendations

Make sure that they have a good support team and make sure you understand how much support is offered for what you are paying. If your church cannot easily use the database, then it is not worth your time.

Likes Best

Church Community Builder does a great job of reporting data and offers excellent customer service. The software has has much variety and ability to collect and organize data.

Likes Least

The admin privileges can be confusing as to what affects it has in or out of group leadership settings. The software also can be difficult to learn if to those that are not software savvy.

Recommendations

Take some time to learn the complexity of the software and discover all it has to offer. It is great software and also has the best customer service, but can be a little confusing to learn.

Likes Best

It does keep track of people and has an easy to use giving portal. I suppose the price point works for what we do with it, but it is not a comprehensive solution.

Likes Least

The interface is not very intuitive and little has changed in the few years I have used it. My main gripe: You can schedule people for a service/task, but you do not have an easy way of giving additional information to only those scheduled (e.g. "don't forget, we have a Baptism, so be prepared after the break"). You have to set up a separate mail message for something like that.

Recommendations

Like most software, they are very good about what it WILL do, but if you do not see something you think it should do, it probably doesn't. Additionally, there is no way to really examine the features of the software without signing up. It's a real hassle if you are trying to evaluate several products.