Pushpay delivers digital solutions to help churches achieve their missions. Their ChurchStaq, ParishStaq, and Resi Media suites aim to simplify engagement, giving, administration, and video streaming—enabling their 14,500+ customers to increase generosity, drive participation, and build stronger community relationships.
N/A
The City (Discontinued)
Score 5.6 out of 10
N/A
The City from ACS Technologies in Florence, South Carolina was a church management software, central to it is its online community feature, but also event registration and management, donations management, and other features. The City was discontinued February 2019. Users are being migrated to Realm, ACS Technologies' flagship church management system.
As the fees are incredibly high, I would not recommend smaller organizations with lower budgets. If an organization is looking to separate their electronic giving processing outside of their church management software to allow a consistent user experience regardless of a change from one church management platform to another, Pushpay is a great solution.
The City would work well for a church who struggles to provide an easy way for members to connect and join groups. While the app has some drawbacks, as noted above, it beats allowing visitors and members to remain disconnected and in the dark about ways to involve themselves in church activities. Better to have this kind of ability to connect than none at all.
Cannot give to more than one fund in a single transaction.
Cannot pull data from the church management software. Therefore, if donors give electronically and via cash or check (which is processed directly in Church management software), the donor cannot run one giving statement through Pushpay, which includes all of their gifts. Pushpay does allow check and cash scanning through their platform which can resolve the statement issue, however, they do not have image scanning software, therefore, a visual copy of checks or cash envelopes cannot be exported or retrieved.
The access to support is excellent; however, the turnover with assigned account managers has been high over the years, which makes it challenging to build a lasting rapport. There have been some technical and functionality issues communicated over the years which have been received by the account manager. At the time, with responses such as "yes, we know it's an issue, and we're working on that, but we don't have a timeframe." These problems are never resolved, nor are progress reports or follow up ever addressed, then the account manager changes and the cycle starts again.
We had previously used a program called eGiving to receive online payments and contributions, and we have previously used PowerChurch as our CRM, and Pushpay (including its Church Community Builder program) far excels both of these other programs. Pushpay is more user-friendly, and its financial program and its CRM program work much more effectively with one another.
While I haven't used another social networking app built for churches, I have used an app built by another local church. The City makes connecting with members easier. The user experience is severely lacking in The City app. It does, however, facilitate connections between members.
Pushpay served as a fine giving platform and allowed for our church to move digitally well.
However, the inordinate fees and costs of their platform ate away at much too large of our donations. With the other platforms out there, it doesn't make sense for us to lock into contracts with excessively high fees.
