Designed for large, complex organizations as well as federated and international nonprofits.
N/A
Bloomerang
Score 8.9 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Bloomerang is a cloud-based donor management platform that is designed to help nonprofit organizations to reach, engage and retain the advocates they depend on to achieve their vision for a better world. The vendor says their donor management application is rooted in principles of philanthropy; simple to use and focused on empowering an organization’s team to achieve remarkable results through enhanced donor loyalty. The vendor’s value proposition is that Bloomerang is…
$79
per month
Pricing
Blackbaud CRM
Bloomerang
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$119
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud CRM
Bloomerang
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
All Plans include: Unlimited users, free email & chat support, free access to Bloomerang Academy, unlimited standard online giving pages & forms, donor engagement scoring, wealth screening, sustainability scorecard, email marketing, nightly address verification & deceased suppression updates, and 1 scholarship to Fundraising Standard (40 pts toward CFRE certification, $599 value)
Bloomerang does not have all the bells as whistles. It is a very paired down system compared to Blackbaud. However, Bloomerang is significantly cheaper and easier to use. If you only have one employee, it would be a good solution.
Bloomerang's dashboard, conceptual design based on donor retention and user-friendliness made it more appealing. The relative cost-value was hands down better than it's competitors. The sales team was highly knowledgable and customer support was and is outstanding.
Bloomerang is not as robust as Blackbaud's Raisers Edge, but it's also not as costly. I find Bloomerang much more user friendly to the novice, but again, it doesn't offer many of the things the full version of Raisers Edge does.
Bloomerang is not as low-cost as Little Green Light, but out-performed that option on the ease of implementation and the easy of the user interface. Bloomerang does not have as much power or as many features as Salesforce of Blackbaud. And Bloomerang does not have as many …
I love being able to see when I log in what my donor retention is and what percentage I have achieved in my fundraising goal. It is extremely beneficial to know how engaged each donor and volunteer is with my organization and to have all interactions and notes with those …
Bloomerang was more affordable and the hype about what it is supposed to be able to do was something we perceived to be an asset. To be fair, because we are a small office trying to accomplish many goals with respect to marketing, communications and fundraising, there has been …
We liked Bloomerang's pricing and features compared to other software solutions. We also liked Bloomerang's intuitive nature and their commitment to customer support and continuing learning through the classes and webinars they offer. Some systems are so complex you have to …
It is advanced and relatively easy to use. It keeps track of information well and makes it easy for fundraisers to manage their relationships. It may work well for organizations with a lot of alumni (maybe 20-30,000?). Not sure. It may not be best for smaller nonprofits because it is a significant financial investment.
If you are a small organization just getting started, Bloomerang can be a good fit. It is simple and straightforward for development staff who maybe aren’t super savvy with data management or analysis in spreadsheets. In the sales demo they will try to upsell a lot of extras that are ultimately not necessary unless your stuff is very unfamiliar with database software. The base price of the software is something like $300 per year, as long as you mix all of the training and phone support add-ons they initially present you with.
It is incredibly user-friendly! From the first time I opened a constituent profile, I could easily navigate between tabs and find the information I need in a timely fashion without confusion.
It allows personalization! Depending on what information is most relevant to me, I can organize the widgets that are shown first. I typically look at the same few pieces of information on every profile, so I don't have to dig for it!
Reporting: Once I understood the logic behind Bloomerang's reporting tools, I could not believe I'd ever worked a different way. Some of our funders request very complicated reports and getting the relevant data out of Bloomerang is SO much easier than it was with our previous CRM tools.
Website integration: I love the tracking functionality that Bloomerang offers, as well as how easy it is to integrate event ticket, volunteer, and other forms into our existing website.
Intuitive design: I've introduced total novices to Bloomerang and been very impressed with how quickly they've been able to figure out all the top level navigation as well as deeper functionality.
The marriage of event registration (on-line) and CRM needs some work.
Challenges to adapt to organization culture surrounding things like "naming conventions", specialized reporting needs, some bugs in roll-up reporting on couples or families.
Tribute giving tracking/reporting is awkward.
Better shared language of function between BBCRM and other BB products like Netcommunity and Raiser's Edge. Can cause some errors in the implementation process.
Netcommunity functionality pushing data to CRM is messy and fraught with challenges.
We've covered a lot, but mostly because we are happy with the system overall. There are a few kinks, and sometimes it takes a minute to figure out the right wording to pull a report or the best way to code a new category that we want to track. But Blackbaud is always there to help us, and once things are figured out - they are super simple to replicate. It wouldn't be worth it to switch to a new system and lose of all our information and time put in to mastering the system
#1 - I am very happy with the product and support so far. #2 - With significant data migration costs, I wouldn't even consider another option for at least 3 years no matter how much better it might be.
I have found no difficulty in using any of its features. However, I have been using constituent managementt databases for 10+ years, so I am accustomed to them, and to a great degree, there are a lot of similarities among the various platforms.
It is purely dependant on who you reach and speak to. You can call twice in an hour period and get two completely different answers. You can get people who are willing to help, people who just tell you no, or people who have no idea what to do. They need to work harder on training their support people. The chat function works very well for simple questions and is my preferred go-to when seeking help.
Any time i had a problem or question it has been easy to find an answer or tutorial. When I cannot find an answer, it is easy to email or live chat with support and they resolve my problems very quickly.
It is highly customizable in some respects and not so much in others. Overall, it is great to pilot, review, and continually review the functionality of it
In comparing Blackbaud CRM to Raiser's Edge, there is more room to configure, customize and seems more refined. In terms of more refined, I am referring to the user interface, the capturing of data, ability to perform simple or complex marketing processes.
We left DonorPerfect for Bloomerang. I had come from an organization that used Raisers Edge and there was no way I was going to stay with DP. RE is great for larger organizations with staff dedicated to the database, but we were a much smaller organization and needed to have something we could all use easily. We demoed Salsa and Neon and liked them both, but Bloomerang had better integration features and seemed to be the most user-friendly.
If you go with Blackbaud purchase the extended training package. Your staff will thank you.
The mantra is "If it isn't in Blackbaud it doesn't exist" is a contradiction because best practice with Blackbaud is to not use attachments which means we had to archive copies of donor letters or membership in a completely separate system. Really? What is the point? Or pay more and more and more...
Because my organization has been using Bloomerang for only one year, we haven't yet studied what impact it has had on our ROI. We have, however, noted that we are able to more efficiently and more rapidly communicate with constituents now than we were able to before we had Bloomerang. We can quickly and efficiently generate acknowledgements and tax receipts - and do so - better than we ever did before.