Blackbaud Altru vs. GoFundMe Pro

Destinations with both membership/donations and admissions will benefit from Altru's capability to track revenue from all angles. As a pretty robust system, you'll find many ways to utilize Altru including through mailings and mailing lists, major donor moves management, merchandise, and online forms.

Well suited for organizations with large fundraising programs or many recurring donors, especially those who have the staffing to devote to reporting and fundraising data analysis. Variety of payment options is good for mobile-first or younger audiences who may be taking more frequent advantage of payment methods like Venmo and Apple Pay. Most useful if it is used in tandem as an event registration/event hosting platform (Classy Event Registration or Classy Live) as attendee data and fundraising is kept in a single place. Less appropriate for smaller organizations, or folks that will not be doing crowdfunding/peer-to-peer/events. There are other platforms that do standard donation pages well that have fewer bells and whistles but are accordingly cheaper.

Incentivized

• Instant sharing of data across departments. When a visitor's address is updated at the front desk, that information is available immediately to our development staff.
• 360 degree view of our visitors. We can see all of a visitor's activity -- when they're coming to the museum, what events they attend -- which gives us a better understanding of their needs.
• Altru can be accessed from anywhere. If we hold an event off-site, we can still handle admissions/registrations so long as there is a network.
• Altru Tech Support is awesome! They are very patient and, if they don't know the answer, they find out for you.

• The Classy platform is easy to use, both for the staff and our volunteer fundraisers
• It's easy to build a great looking fundraising page
• Classy support (particularly chat and phone) are attentive and responsive. Every one there is smart and nice!

Incentivized

• Custom querying features can be cumbersome to build and don't always give you the results you expect.
• Online payments cannot always be re-designated, which can be difficult with high level donors and board members make pledge payments through an online form and then they cannot be re-designated to their pledge.
• Multiple donor or membership programs can be difficult to manage.

Incentivized

• Campaigns lack customization options which can be limiting- while you can add code to make some changes, there is a basic framework that you can't always override.
• Slow to roll out some donor payment options like Venmo.
• Not inexpensive price point and on an annual contract, so the software is definitely an investment.

Incentivized

Blackbaud Altru is a very integrated system, but training is lacking and the use of the system takes some getting use to

VERY easy to use, but lacks flexibility. But very easy to learn and master, even for someone with technical skills. They offer live chat which is a great help for on-demand support. At higher call volumes, you may wait 10 minutes, but I’ve never waited for more than that and the support if 90% of the time very helpful.

Incentivized

They are always available and very knowledgable. Many times I am able to come up with a solution before they've finished troubleshooting just by having talked through it with them. I really appreciate the Chat feature to answer simple questions in a timely fashion. The training I received was top notch and very detailed.

Incentivized

Classy's team was very helpful as we transitioned over, and helped us get everything set up quite easily. The few times we've had issues or questions, their online chat feature has been a quick way to get answers. On Giving Tuesday last year, the site went down, but Classy was quick with communication to its clients and had the problem resolved in about an hour. I know that if we have any problems or questions, the company and its team will be responsive and helpful. That makes a difference to me and our small team. We don't have time to troubleshoot or stay on hold for a long time waiting for support.

Incentivized

Having used multiple databases to collect data from visitors across all of our points of contact, we found we had information, but no comparison between areas. It was possible to have a volunteer who made a donation, bought a membership, made purchases in the shop, and attended a workshop, but only visited the galleries 1x a year. The result was to have power users without knowing it. While each of the products we had used were fine in their own right, they lacked the ability to tell us what we most needed to know - how often we were used across all of our points of service. Altru gave us that.

Incentivized

I have not used any other platforms like Classy. Given I came into this organization after Classy was already chosen, I was pleased with how easy it was to learn the platform and how user-friendly the entire thing is. Although I haven't used any other platforms like it, I would highly recommend it.

• It has become very tedious to account for registrants in each session of a class or camp, because you have to "sell" them into each session in order to have an accurate class roster.
• It is very easy to process payment and entry fees to our Museum and programs.
• It is easy to retrieve accurate information and records of patrons.

Incentivized

• This has been nothing but positive. We use the basic version so there is no fee associated with it other than a percentage of each transaction. So everything that comes in is added revenue where the only investment is staff time, but there is no monetary investment.

Incentivized