Pushpay Church Management Software Review

Please note: Church Community Builder merged with Pushpay in late 2019. Although some of their service offerings will look identical under the Pushpay umbrella, other specifics have changed since this software was first reviewed. For a more comprehensive understanding of what Pushpay and Church Community Builder now offer, visit their site and learn about their current package options.

Pushpay Cost

Pushpay, previously known as Church Community Builder (CCB), offers three packages with increasing functionality: Essential, Standard, and Deluxe. The price of each is driven by your weekly attendance (and not your total number of member profiles in the system).

  • Essential: Starts at $90/month for up to 250 attendees
  • Standard: Starts at $120/month for up to 250 attendees
  • Deluxe: Starts at $180/month for up to 250 attendees
  • Additional cost for premium services: for example, virtual training is $250 per session

We recommend the Standard package for those who value the system's check-in, facility management, and volunteer management features. Deluxe is recommended for churches that need multi-site functionality.

Cancellation: Church Community Builder requires a one-year contract period.

To see full pricing information for Church Community Builder, contact them here.

Table of Contents

Full Review: PushPay

Church Community Builder (CCB) was founded in 1998 by Chris Fowler and Free Grafton to allow ministries to do more ministry. Today, it's web-based church management system serves over 4,000 churches of all sizes. The company is based in Seattle, Colorado Springs, and Auckland and has 123 full-time employees.

Pushpay is one of the leading software solutions for medium to large churches with multiple campuses. All of the systems in its class are on the more mature side, and therefore come with complex, somewhat outdated interfaces that can feel clunky at times. Pushpay also does not have a proprietary accounting or giving solution. With that said, Pushpay is a tested, solid option for churches that require more advanced functionality. We recommend evaluating this tool alongside other solutions like MinistryPlatform and Rock RMS for those in need of an enterprise-level ChMS.

To see the latest updates from Pushpay, you can check out the website here.

Key Features

Below, we'll discuss some of the key features of Pushpay, and how they would benefit your church. We have also included images to give you a sense of the look and feel of the software.

Member Management

Pushpay allows you to create profiles of your members and store important information. In each profile, you can store contact information, family members, key life dates, and completed forms. Pushpay also tracks each individual's involvement in your church: their attendance, financial activity and giving, group activity, and volunteer history. Here's an example of an individual's involvement record that is stored within their profile:

CCB involvement record

A time-saving feature is the ability to call or email anyone directly from their profile with a single click on either your desktop or mobile device. If you want to edit a member profile, here's what it looks like in Church Community Builder:

CCB edit profile

Church Community Builder also allows you to create groups of members to help you develop your community. The ability to easily find and communicate with groups is a strength of CCB. Using CCB's groups feature, you can:

  • Track attendance
  • Have 2-way conversations through email, SMS and bulletin boards
  • Plan events
  • Maintain a group calendar
  • Coordinate helping each other during key life moments

Member Communication

Church Community Builder gives you and your leaders various options for communicating with your members. One of the system's top features is called "Processes". Using Processes, you can create and advance your members through workflows with a series of steps. Common examples are follow up emails to first-time guests, following up with people who have had major life events, creating a plan for a group's upcoming trip, or ensuring new volunteers go through the proper onboarding steps. Here's an example of first time visitor follow-up process in the system:

CCB connection process

Within the groups feature, leaders and group members can have two-way conversations. Leaders can leverage the same capabilities available in the general system to perform mail merges, start discussions on message board threads, and send text messages to group members.

Event & Facilities Management

Events are an critical part of every church organization. Church Community Builder created its events tool to make it easy for your leaders to effectively create, find, and manage one-time and recurring events. Members can RSVP to events, and leaders can use check-in functionality to take attendance (note: check-in is only available in Standard and Deluxe packages). If you purchase the Deluxe package, you can use tablet-based check-in to avoid getting stuck behind a table or desktop monitor.

Parents have the option to save time by expeditiously checking their children into events with a unique barcode. The Deluxe package, also includes a beneficial check-out security feature that ensures each child leaves church with the appropriate guardian.

To provide visibility into your events, everyone in your church has access to their own personal and family calendars that shows what is happening in their groups, ministries, and volunteer commitments. Members can also see a public, campus-wide calendar. Administrators with proper permissions can see private calendars including a facilities calendar, and an all-events calendar.

CCB also offers facility management functionality in the Standard and Deluxe Packages. This system allows your leaders to request rooms and resources for on-site events. The tool shows you all rooms in your church, along with those that are available for the specific event. You can also choose room layouts and add resources (e.g. a coffee cart) to your event. This is what the interface looks like when requesting rooms and resources for a specific event:

CCB facility management

Giving

Church Community Builder offers tools to make it easy for your members to give to your church. The giving functionality is available in all package levels. The tool allows you to log donations made by cash and check. To support online giving, CCB does require an integration and separate subscription with a third-party tool; full integrations are only available with BluePay and PushPay. CCB's system also allows you to create end-of-year giving statements to help your members keep track of their donations.

Forms

The forms functionality is only available in the Standard and Deluxe packages. It is an effective way to collect various types of information about your members. Common forms include volunteer sign-up forms, event registration forms, donation forms, guest surveys, and group interest forms. Your members are not required to sign-in to complete a form, and they can also include attachments, payment and admin notifications. Finally, forms can be used to tigger Processes in CCB. Customers like CCB's forms because they are easy to set up and the data from forms flows nicely into other parts of the application. Here is an example of Church Community Builder's form builder tool:

CCB form builder

Mobile Application

The company also offers a mobile application called the Lead App that is available for iPhones and Android. The Lead App was built to help your leadership team when they are on the go, and is not meant for your full congregation. The company is developing a new app for the congregation. Here are the main features available in the app:

  • Access and edit member profiles
  • Complete Process steps
  • View schedules and coordinate with volunteers
  • Take attendance at group events
  • Send individual and group messages
  • Create notes about members and share with your team

Here's an example of the app interface for group management:

CCB app

Is Pushpay right for you?

Pushpay, previously known as Church Community Builder, is a solid choice for medium to large churches with multiple campuses that are looking for a robust system, and do not require integrated accounting or giving solutions. Strengths of the system include its group communication functionality and Processes tool. We recommend evaluating CCB alongside other solutions like MinistryPlatform and Rock RMS for those in need of an enterprise-level ChMS. To schedule a demo and learn more, visit Pushpay here.

Bruce Hogan

Bruce Hogan is Co-founder & CEO of SoftwarePundit. He leads the team's research and publishes content about software products and trends. Bruce has experience investing at multi-billion dollar private equity firms, leading teams at venture-backed technology companies, and launching new businesses. You can connect with Bruce on LinkedIn.

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