Realm vs Realm Accounting: Which is a better fit?

Bruce: This is Bruce from Grace and St. Stephens Episcopal Church where I am the Realm administrator. I rate Realm a 5. Before we had Realm, we had Church Windows. That system did not run in the Cloud as Realm does, and it didn't have an integrated accounting system that was robust. Had an integrated accounting system, but not as robust as Realm's was. It also was not as customizable as Realm is, and it didn't have as robust a CRM feature as Realm does. In this case, CRM is constituent relationship management. We looked at several systems that churches in our area had and the main factors that we chose Realm, were it's CRM capability. There was one other system we liked that was robust in that same way, but Realm had an integrated accounting system and that did not. The other reason was the Diocese of Colorado had also done some evaluations and they were promoting Realm among the Episcopal churches in the Diocese. That didn't mean we had to choose Realm, but when all was said and done, we decided to go with Realm. So when you start with Realm, the first thing you have to do is convert from your old system, in our case Church Windows, to a new one. In my opinion, that did not go well and I blame the ACST people for that primarily. I mean, I'm a database guy. I know fields have to be carefully defined and I think that just was not handled as well, the mapping, if you will, as clearly and easily as it should have been. And that had a lot to do with the people on the ACST side that were doing this conversion. They were nice. I just felt they were not as on the ball as they should have been. Now once the conversion was done, then you have a lot of education to do with staff about using it. So the first thing you have to do is make sure you've got your account code set up for the accounting side and all of your data fields and how to use them and what it means. A lot of it was pretty intuitively obvious, the contact information, emails, phone numbers, addresses, things like that. But there were other things that were unique to Realm that staff had to learn and it's taken quite a while for them to catch onto that. It's not difficult, it's just that churches are generally understaffed and they don't think about business processes real clearly, so to speak. They're nice people, but they're dealing with a tough crowd. And so anyway, we've been working on documenting the business process related to Realm and that is helping. But even today, after three years of doing all this, things pop up and we, "Oh, here's one we missed," and we've got to figure out how to deal with that. If you're thinking about Realm like you would any CRM system, again, constituent relationship management system, which is what a church wants, particularly the bigger the church you have. Smaller churches kind of know everybody. Bigger churches, it's harder to know everybody and engage them. And what you're really trying to do with any system, CRM system including Realm, is really work to engage your constituents, your congregation, if you will. There's implications of that for the kind of staff you need to have to do all that. So I think you have to think carefully about the connection between the staff that you have, what skills they have and what time they have and what you're trying to accomplish. So in our case, like many churches, we're trying to build the engagement of people with our church, deepen that engagement, deepen their faith in the spiritual life of the church and in their lives. So you really need to think about not just how to collect payment or pledge numbers or donations and email them or mail them, but how to really enrich their engagement and interactions with the church to grow their faith and their stewardship as in our case, ministers of Jesus Christ. So there are staff implications to this as well. So for example, you certainly want some good marketing skills. You certainly want some good database skills. You certainly want some good, in our case, Excel skills because there's a lot of things in Realm that... It's pretty good reporting, but it's not a full database rich querying system. So there's a lot of times you can do a query in Realm. It's pretty easy to do, but then you have to build Excel files subsequent to that to get the kind of output you specifically want. And when we were looking at Realm and other systems, that's what we talked a lot about with the other churches. What were the staff implications that went along with Realm. The other thing I would definitely recommend is the integration. Make sure you get, like Realm has, an integrated accounting system so you don't have to do double entry of donations. If you don't have an integrated accounting systems, you have to take the summary of donations and post that to another system like QuickBooks for example. We didn't want to do that. And Realm is very good at that integration. They have it built in, they've had it for years. It works like a charm. Finally, I would say think about security. Realm has never had a breach. It's got a very good security system. People can control their privacy in the system and that was another factor in choosing Realm.