Date: Mon, 08 Jun 2020 23:30:42 -0000
Good evening,
We are currently using Powerchurch and looking to convert to Powerchurch
online. Are there other congregations who have done this?
All the best!
--
*Rev. Julianne Lepp*
*Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation, Eau Claire, WI*
*She/Her/Hers*
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Date: Mon, 08 Jun 2020 23:45:05 -0000
We have used Power Church for many years and moved over to the online version five or six years ago. It is much easier for our multiple users. The transition was simple enough. Well worth doing in our opinion. We are also now evaluating Breeze for our donations and contact relations management. We will post donations as journal entries monthly into Powerchurch.
Tom Loughrey
Treasurer
Orange Coast UU
Costa Mesa, CA
143/$390k
Sent from my iPad
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Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2020 00:24:40 -0000
UUSLO transitioned to PowerChurch online four or five years ago.
While there is an occasional hiccup due to life in the cloud, I don't think
any of us would want to go back to an office-based system.
Terry Throop
Unitarian Universalists San Luis Obispo
225 Members/$370K
-----
Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2020 00:47:34 -0000
We started with PowerChurch online- I'd do the move! They are currently
migrating to Empower, a browser based app that looked good. So far
membership and contributions have been converted. Accounting is behind. This
new version is looking good.
D Hober
UUCY
From: jakeholland.net at gmail.com (Jake Holland)
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2020 07:07:29 -0000
Hi Dirk,
As it happens, I do have an update within the last few weeks about CMS, and
if anyone has advice it would be appreciated.
We're trying to retire a legacy site from ~2002 (somewhat refactored in
~2008), but the functionality we were getting from it has been a challenge
to set aside and stabilize on breeze instead.
In particular, we have a long-standing "neighborhood networks" grouping for
members and friends who attend, where our community life committee
maintains lists of people grouped by physical location, for better
targeting on inter-member interactions like meal trains and some parties
and gatherings.
Previously, when someone changed address we had some automation to notify
the community life committee about it so they can make the appropriate
updates. I recently got something running using the breeze api:
https://github.com/CVUUFellowship/church/blob/master/scripts/sync_email…
That mess will dump out a csv that includes name, email, address,
membership status, neighborhood assignment and compare it against the
previous day's run, and mail an update of the changes that need examining
to an email address.
Ideally I could do something similar for changes to tags, which we're using
for some things like leadership positions and committee membership and
such, but the use of tags in the breeze api is kind of awkward. You can't,
as far as I can tell, get the details to include the list of tags that
apply to a person, even though there's a web page that provides that.
I guess I'm curious if anybody else has anything similar, and if so whether
they've got a process they're happy with.
I'm also looking for a decent way to have documents that are only
accessible to members, ideally with a single way to maintain membership.
This is another feature our legacy website has, and one we depend on, that
has made it difficult to move away yet. The rough plan is to get a wiki
spun up with a private section and to move the content into there, but
ideally I'm hoping to avoid maintaining a bunch of accounts in multiple
different systems. Again here I was thinking if breeze could do SSO that
would perhaps help a bunch, but it doesn't seem to be able to.
How are others handling this kind of thing, and is there anyone that has
transitioned to something and had it go really smoothly and address their
maintenance problems well?
Kind regards,
Jake Holland
-----
From: hoymand at gmail.com (Dirk Herr-Hoyman)
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2020 17:03:39 -0000
Hi Jake- Yes I understand what you are after.
Took a quick look at the current Breeze features and API.
You are doing about what can be done with their current features/API.
What I think is needed is an API that deals with Location (GPS and
geolocation).
Something that's made with Mapbox would do.
Then what you'd want is to have a Tag which is associated with
geolocation. With some work, one could bring in US Census data
where they have neighborhood-like data. Each user would
get their address associated with one of those Tags automagically.
This is in the territory where Breeze needs to add features/API.
Have you chatted with someone from Sales?
What you really want to chat with is a Product Manager, as they
deal with new stuff in development.
would be a feature which would bring in more customers.
Good luck and let us know if you get anywhere!
--Dirk
Dirk Herr-Hoyman
-----
From: jakeholland.net at gmail.com (Jake Holland)
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2020 18:39:17 -0000
Hi Dirk,
They actually have a way to add a custom field, and that's what we're using
for neighborhood assignment.
They do actually have a lat/lon that's calculated from the address, but our
group assignment isn't quite as strict as geo-located (occasionally people
who move prefer to remain in a network that's not too far away and has the
same people in it they were grouped with before). We're still doing the
assignment according to a zip code lookup that someone put together years
ago. So their current feature set was able to accommodate us there.
Likewise we were able to add a custom field for membership status.
The part where we're a bit more stuck is the feature where we could notify
the right people when something changes in the database, because there's
some stuff outside of breeze that has to change also when that happens.
That's what my script more or less accomplishes for address, email, and
status. (Though there are some quirks we're still discovering--just
yesterday I was informed of a very strange situation where one of the
members suddenly stopped showing up in the API responses, for no
discernable reason. After a couple hours of debugging I think it's
probably a bug in the backend, though it's of course hard to be sure. I
ended up making a new entry with the same info, and that one worked fine.)
But I can't find a sane way to do the same for tag changes. (And "sane" is
perhaps a bit optimistic for the way I'm running that script, but it's
closer to sane than not automating these checks...)
I did reach out to breeze support, but I was disappointed by the answer I
got, which was a form letter with this quote as the main thrust:
"You asked some great questions regarding the current API and its
capabilities. In anticipation of the upcoming release of our New API
<https://www.breezechms.com/blog/july-2019-updates> our development team
had to make the very difficult decision to end the support of our current
API. *As of February 1, 2020, we are no longer able to support questions or
inquiries regarding the current API."*
I was surprised to hear they ended support more than 6 months before
releasing a new API, but I suppose most likely there's some turnover or
something that made it impossible.
So mostly I was just wondering whether anyone has a decent automation
system in place for keeping things up to date as things change.
Thanks for the comments.
Kind regards,
Jake
-----
From: hoymand at gmail.com (Dirk Herr-Hoyman)
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2020 19:44:56 -0000
I'll adding some comments inline (which is another style when you do
multiple back and forths).
Then will go back to your wondering about document protection and
membership, with some more thoughts.
> They actually have a way to add a custom field, and that's what we're
> using for neighborhood assignment.
>
> They do actually have a lat/lon that's calculated from the address, but
> our group assignment isn't quite as strict as geo-located (occasionally
> people who move prefer to remain in a network that's not too far away and
> has the same people in it they were grouped with before). We're still
> doing the assignment according to a zip code lookup that someone put
> together years ago. So their current feature set was able to
> accommodate us there.
I suppose zip code can be a proxy for neighborhood. Me, if I was to bother
with this I'd want the geocode and the census data neighborhood.
All there to be done.
> Likewise we were able to add a custom field for membership status.
> This should not be a custom field, it should be a standard one. But yes,
adding your own will work.
> The part where we're a bit more stuck is the feature where we could notify
> the right people when something changes in the database, because there's
> some stuff outside of breeze that has to change also when that happens.
>
> That's what my script more or less accomplishes for address, email, and
> status. (Though there are some quirks we're still discovering--just
> yesterday I was informed of a very strange situation where one of the
> members suddenly stopped showing up in the API responses, for no
> discernable reason. After a couple hours of debugging I think it's
> probably a bug in the backend, though it's of course hard to be sure. I
> ended up making a new entry with the same info, and that one worked fine.)
>
> But I can't find a sane way to do the same for tag changes. (And "sane"
> is perhaps a bit optimistic for the way I'm running that script, but it's
> closer to sane than not automating these checks...)
You are at the limits with what's possible with their current approach. Or
dare I say architecture.
What you need is a callback that fires when something changes in the
database. Not just anything, you want changes to existing users.
It's possible to add the infrastructure to do that (I've been part of doing
just that), but it's tricky to catch these callbacks.
If they don't put the right hooks in for that, you are left with dumping
out the data and doing a compare.
Done just that in my past. Like on ALL the class enrollments for the
entire University of Wisconsin System (severall 100,000 records each day).
Will work, but it feels clunky. Yep.
> I did reach out to breeze support, but I was disappointed by the answer I
> got, which was a form letter with this quote as the main thrust:
> "You asked some great questions regarding the current API and its
> capabilities. In anticipation of the upcoming release of our New API
> <https://www.breezechms.com/blog/july-2019-updates> our development team
> had to make the very difficult decision to end the support of our current
> API. *As of February 1, 2020, we are no longer able to support questions
> or inquiries regarding the current API."*
>
> This is a company limitation of their approach to their customers, getting
feedback, and even more working with developers like yourself.
You don't want to talk to support, you want to talk to their product
development. They do have product managers who are supposed to be
the point for talking with customers like yourself. But they aren't yet
making them available. Typically, this is done thru sales when you
are just thinking about becoming a customer (pre-sales).
> I was surprised to hear they ended support more than 6 months before
> releasing a new API, but I suppose most likely there's some turnover or
> something that made it impossible.
APIs are only useful if the company works with the developer community.
Going back to your question about having documents that are only accessible
by folks like staff or maybe congregational members.
That's another pretty basic feature, for which they'd have to decide is
important enough to get into their feature set.
If they don't already have it, nor are talking about having it, it would
make me think about other options.
I am familar with doing just that in other products like Joomla or
WordPress. Did something like this in
UU're Home, a bed-and-breakfast for UUs directory service (see
http://uurehome.com).
At the moment, guess I'd pick on WP as it's quite popular.
The pieces are all there in WP to do this, but one has to stitch them
together. Basically what you
need is a way to keep track of the user account, let folks login with other
passwords (like Facebook or Google, there's more possible),
and then have a membership management. All there to be done.
Once I get that far, in my thinking, I'd start thinking about doing the
whole doggone system, the church donors, classes,
events and so on. Shoot, you sell things or hold an auction out of WP too.
The heart of this is membership management, at least to me.
I have looked to see if anyone does this out of open source bits (would
also cover non-profits),
but every thing seems to have gone more nearly commercially right away.
While I'd like to think that Breeze could handle doing a few more features,
not sure if they are organizationally
ready to talk to a bunch of customers. Maybe they'll evolve into doing
just that.
--Dirk
Dirk Herr-Hoyman
-----
From: abqtech at uuabq.org (Rick Held)
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2020 17:58:51 -0000
Dear Larry,
Thank you for undertaking the research and decision. You are much appreciated out here!
Rick Held
Staff Volunteer IT Manager
First Unitarian Church
Office: (505) 884-1801