Church Windows vs ShelbyNext Membership: Which is a better fit?

William: My name is William. I'm the office manager. The rating for Church Windows is five stars. For more reviews like this, click below. When I started here, we were using Membership Plus and QuickBooks because there's no integration between the two and Membership Plus is simply the membership program. We switched to Church Windows. Church Windows is basically a program that all the modules work together. With one entry, you can affect all the various modules you need. Church Windows sent us a program that would transfer over all of the members and the membership information. We had to input the accounting portion, but at least the membership information was easily transferred from Membership Plus to Church Windows. If you're looking for a complete church program that can run the church everywhere from scheduling, membership, payroll, donations, accounting, you've reached Church Windows and you could not beat the program, especially for the price.

Alisha: My name is Alisha and I am a director of communications. I work for a nonprofit religious organization, and I would give ShelbyNext a five out of five. One of the things that I was looking for when I was looking at different programs for our church to move towards was user-friendliness and how our current staff, old and new, would dive into the program. And the different programs that I looked at, they may have had a few more features, but they weren't as user-friendly. So we looked at Planning Center and, again, they have some great options. It just wasn't a good fit for us. We also looked at Raiser's Edge. We looked at Text in Church. There were a lot of different pro tools out there that we could have used, but none of them met the need quite like Shelby did for us. The reason, the biggest reason that we chose ShelbyNext was because it was able to have our members and our giving all at one location. Lots of the other programs we saw, they just couldn't do that and do it well. So our members can check into Sunday school classes, they can make a gift during a service, and then, they can also see the address and things of maybe somebody else in their Sunday school class. So there was lots of different options for us to be able to get everybody under one umbrella. That was ShelbyNext. It made everything so much easier from an admin perspective, as well as for our members. They didn't have to have four different apps to be able to come to church and enjoy what was going on. And they were able to be more connected and more intentional with their relationships. Onboarding was what I was most concerned about when we got this product. It's not always easy to train a bunch of people on how to use something the right way, but the team at Shelby made it so easy for us. We purchased the package that included eight hours of in-person training, as well as eight hours of virtual training. And their online and in-person trainers are out of this world, and we still call them to this day. They were able to come on and teach our staff all together, as well as a few of us, more specific needs. And again, their customer service, any time that we've had a call or a question, if they hadn't been able to answer it right away, they call us right back that same day. So onboarding was just super, super easy. Over the past year, they've added a lot of extra options for us. We're always getting new interns or even new staff members. And so, we don't have to do that full onboarding process every time somebody comes on. There are step-by-step tutorials and videos that are available on each screen that you go to on ShelbyNext that make it really easy just to jump right in and get started with just a few bits of basic knowledge. If your organization is looking for a product like Shelby that the offers membership, scheduling, giving, all of those things, I highly recommend that you take some time and call somebody from Shelby to see how they can tailor their program to fit yours. They are always adding new things and we've even called and seen if they will add a new feature just for our church, to which they will put in their products. We have seen that happen over and over and over again. Right now during COVID, we've experienced a few growing pains and Shelby has been there to work with us and to let us know that they're also doing some development on their backend. That has already started to help us with our check-in processes and making social distancing even easier with their check-in system. I would also like to say that if you're thinking about using a program, maybe such as Pushpay, which is something that we looked at for our giving, they were able to do some different automations for us and donor recognition through their giving site that I don't have a lot of time to tell you about right now. But it is worth, again, setting up a zoom call with one of their sales reps so they can see how it can make a big difference for you. The number one thing that I can say is nobody at their organization is going to be pushy with you. That was a major turnoff for some others that we looked at, but the people at ShelbyNext, they're kind, they're considerate. And again, they just want what's best for you. They're not just worried about selling their product.