Blackbaud Award Management vs. Bonterra Guided Fundraising

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Blackbaud Award Management
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Blackbaud Award Management is a solution that aims to transform institutions' student awards programs and revolutionize donor stewardship practices. Built for higher education institutions of all types and sizes, this cloud-based solution is designed to serve as a catalyst to improve student access to awards and scholarship funds, create impactful stewardship practices, and enhance cross-functional visibility throughout the scholarship process.N/A
Bonterra Guided Fundraising
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Bonterra Guided Fundraising offers a nonprofit fundraising suite of applications, with donor management features like intelligent tracking of donor readiness and targeted messaging.N/A
Pricing
Blackbaud Award ManagementBonterra Guided Fundraising
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud Award ManagementBonterra Guided Fundraising
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsPricing is based on how many contacts are imported into the Donor Management System. All packages have unlimited users, unlimited campaigns, unlimited peer-to-peer pages, unlimited emails and communications, and optional events and auctions. They all also include full support and complete data migration.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Blackbaud Award ManagementBonterra Guided Fundraising
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Top Pros
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Blackbaud Award ManagementBonterra Guided Fundraising
Small Businesses
Submittable
Submittable
Score 8.9 out of 10
OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies

No answers on this topic

OneCause
OneCause
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises

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Blackbaud CRM
Blackbaud CRM
Score 7.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Blackbaud Award ManagementBonterra Guided Fundraising
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(9 ratings)
9.0
(123 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(5 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(1 ratings)
2.8
(4 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Blackbaud Award ManagementBonterra Guided Fundraising
Likelihood to Recommend
Blackbaud
This system has all the intentions of being fantastic. It is a great system if you have scholarships that are blindly rated or scored, or if you have multiple users with a few scholarships each. However, as a college with hundreds of scholarships that have 200-300 qualified students for each one, it is difficult to have a blind process. Plus, if the university gave our college the ability to edit some things, they would have to give those permissions to every person with a login. Needless to say, the system is not quite equipped for multiple users within one university who all have different editing privileges. However, as cumbersome as it has been to learn and manipulate for our purposes, it has allowed us to award more funds than any year prior due to the ease of having all of the student data in one place.
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Bonterra
Specifically, the customer service is one of the best of any online service we have used. The staff is respectful and speedy, and I have never had any occasion to be disappointed in their help. The silent auction tool we have used for the past two online silent auctions has been excellent. We are about to use the new service. I've been working on setting it up, and so far, so good. We would really like to track our volunteers in Network for Good somehow. Not to do recruitment or volunteer forms, as we don't use public recruitment of volunteers for our use. However, volunteer hours are very important as we do fundraising and grantwriting, as they show our excellent relationship with the community. I'd like to be able to track the volunteer hours... especially if they are also donors. I sure would appreciate a REAL text-to-give, where it's not 10 numbers to text-to-give but just 6 or so. We have tried using this and the feedback we have gotten is "This isn't so easy." To be able to say: "Text MITTENS to 123456" is a lot cleaner than "Text MITTENS to 888-888-8888." Granted this is a small thing, but this is what people ask about.
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Pros
Blackbaud
  • Keeps awarding data in one central hub
  • Allows users to easily review awarding history and application history
  • Easily customizable for the average user
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Bonterra
  • Top-notch customer service! The Network For Good team is responsive, genuinely courteous, and knowledgeable about the product.
  • Communication options are available for all donor preferences, from good old-fashioned direct mail to email, text, and video. And all are easy to use!
  • Creating forms for surveys and other data capturing is very easy, as is construction of reports on donors and donations for management use.
  • Love the format options and drag-and-drop functionality -- including embedding videos -- for newsletters and email engagements.
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Cons
Blackbaud
  • Our school is unique in that we require a minimum of two references to be completed per applicant and they must be the right references. One must be a teacher/instructor if the applicant has been a student in the last 5 years and the others must be professional level references. To date there is no way for the system to identify and qualify students based on their references, so this process falls to us.
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Bonterra
  • Individual contact listing being required before the company or business causes some business to be dropped if the individual leaves the business
  • when you have a donor who donated both as a business and as an individual sometimes one or the other does not come up in the listing when you search for an amount for the year
  • FaceBook donations being identified by at least who did the fundraiser, not the donors. I do a birthday fundraiser every year for Caring Carroll and there is no indication that it came from me. The money comes in but we do not know where it came from who held the fundraiser.
  • The fact that the FaceBook donations go into our Network for Good database before we even have the money is confusing.
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Likelihood to Renew
Blackbaud
While the price is a bit high, the software provides everything we need to effectively award and track scholarships and awards within our institution. The ease of use allows for everyday users and occasional users to both be able to access the information they need without wasting time or resources
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Bonterra
We are still learning and rebuilding our nonprofit using this platform, so this year is a trial run to see how we can increase our network and our donations. So long as we are able to see a significant return on investment in terms of donations received through the platform, we will renew for next year.
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Usability
Blackbaud
No answers on this topic
Bonterra
It's very easy to use and customizable.
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Support Rating
Blackbaud
I lean on our centralized Foundation for support related to Blackbaud Award Management. However, any time I've had a question they couldn't answer, they were able to get the support quickly and efficiently. I give an 8, versus a 9 or 10, because our centralized office has had some requests in for changes to the system that have not been made. Some parts of the system are not working for our purposes, and we've asked for some changes that should be doable. However, the time it takes to get universal changes made is quite long
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Bonterra
Bonterra customer service is slow and terrible. They take forever to address the actual issue, constantly making incorrect assumptions about the issue. I have spent more than 45 minutes on hold, just to speak with a customer service representative when the chat function was unable to provide assistance with my issue.
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Implementation Rating
Blackbaud
No answers on this topic
Bonterra
NFG is great and the process was smooth. thank you.
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Alternatives Considered
Blackbaud
Blackbaud Award Management easily integrates with their other softwares but award management is more specific to scholarship and award needs and tracking. RE NXT is moreso for the fundraising and tracking side of things whereas Award Management is for the scholarship side of things. Making sure you're purchasing the right sofware for your needs is important.
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Bonterra
For us, Bonterra Guided Fundraising offered the best overall bang for the buck. There were cheaper options that didn't over the features we needed and more expensive options that we felt didn't offer features as good as the ones we were seeing at Bonterra. For an overall option that did more of what we wanted to do, Bonterra was the best choice for us.
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Return on Investment
Blackbaud
  • We had a 24% increase in applications received after the first year
  • We had a 10% increase in scholarship dollars awarded
  • We had an increase in scholarship funds opened, including companies we weren't able to accommodate before.
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Bonterra
  • We signed up with Network for Good in the fall of 2022 & had a last minute end of year giving campaign using videos we made in Network for Good & emailing them. We also used giving pages & listed a variety of giving amounts that a donor could select.
  • We experienced at least a 20% increase in giving.
  • Increase in our communication with donors because there are tools in Network for Good that make it easy.
  • Our organization looks more professional with the giving pages & it accommodates ways to give.
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ScreenShots

Bonterra Guided Fundraising Screenshots

Screenshot of Guided Fundraising is a mobile friendly system built with the small and growing non-profit in mindScreenshot of Event ticketing and managementScreenshot of Mobile giving, text-to-give, and peer-to-peer fundraisingScreenshot of Donor communications in a variety of ways