Web-based church management software
4.4/5 (356 reviews)Church Community Builder is a cloud-based church management software with a focus on increasing connection and communication between church members.
Church Community Builder offers a drag-and-drop form creation feature, allowing users to create forms for different purposes, including event registration, donation collection, member surveys, and more. There are multiple answer format options, such as radio buttons, checkboxes, drop-down menus, and scales and priority lists. Inbuilt automations can be used to add respondents to groups, positions, events, or process queues, and these can be further specified based on an individual’s response to questions on the form.
Church Community Builder’s dashboards reveal short-term and long-term trends in metrics such as attendance, volunteering, and donations. Shareable event summaries include attendance numbers, event topics, general notes, prayer requests, details of new visitors, and more. Users can create, share and save their own custom reports, or use those included with Church Community Builder.
Church Community Builder assists users with volunteer scheduling, with its drag-and-drop interface allowing users to copy volunteers between weeks, send requests for positions that need to be filled, email volunteers with opportunities, or directly place them into open positions. Users can view all volunteer and event schedules to see how frequently individuals are serving, and volunteers are automatically reminded of their commitments by Church Community Builder.
Church Community Builder includes a touchscreen-compatible check-in feature, with an iPad check-in app available, enabling users to view room rosters, track attendance in real time, print name badges and labels, use barcode scanners for check-in, and more. It also supports text message paging, allowing parents to be contacted quickly if there are any problems.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
Pricing is available on enquiry.
Users can produce forms for event registration, member surveys, donation collection, and more, using the drag-and-drop creator, and choose from multiple answer formats, including checkboxes, drop-down menus, radio buttons, and scales.
With Church Community Builder’s automations, individuals responding to forms can automatically be added to groups, events, and process queues, with the options for different positions within groups based on responses to questions.
Church Community Builder’s dashboards allow users to view metrics on attendance, donations, and more, and show both short-term and long-term trends.
Users can email or directly add volunteers when positions are available, send requests and copy volunteers from one week to another with the drag-and-drop interface, view all schedules to see how often individuals are serving, and Church Community Builder automatically reminds volunteers of their schedules.
Church Community Builder’s check-in is touchscreen compatible, with a check-in app available for iPad, and enables users to view live room rosters, print labels and name tags, check in with barcode scanning, and more.
Below are some frequently asked questions for Church Community Builder.
Church Community Builder offers the following pricing plans:
Free Trial: Not Available
Pricing is available on enquiry.
Church Community Builder offers the following features:
Church Community Builder has the following typical customers:
Mid Size Business, Non Profit, Small Business
Church Community Builder supports the following languages:
English
We do not have any information about what Church Community Builder pricing plans
We do not have any information about what devices Church Community Builder supports
Church Community Builder integrates with the following applications:
BombBomb, Brushfire, CommunityHERO, Continue To Give, Givelify, Grow, Kindrid, PastorsLine, Tithe.ly, WorshipPlanning.com
Church Community Builder offers the following support options:
Knowledge Base, Online Support, Phone Support
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.