Designed for large, complex organizations as well as federated and international nonprofits.
N/A
Bloomerang
Score 8.4 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)
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Blackbaud CRM
Bloomerang
Considered Both Products
Blackbaud CRM
No answer on this topic
Bloomerang
Verified User
Administrator
Chose Bloomerang
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 works well enough for fundraising purposes and donor tracking. I think it would be less appropriate for instances or industries where you don't need so many data points on someone. You are able to attach a lot of information to a record so if you don't need that info (simply need contact info for example) you might want a simpler system
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.
Accessing in-depth data for a single constituent is easily done and customizable by user working with "tiles" on the home screen
Generating lists of possible prospects with specific similarities can be done with a few clicks and then stored for more research later
well designed relationship options allow for a a look at specific constituents and how they might relate to other constituents in the system leading to more effective prospecting
Screens can be easily customized by user or user group eliminating irrelevant data and presenting only truly relevant information
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.
Certain aspects of Blackbaud are oddly non-customizable.
Blackbaud updates/support is slow and often ineffective - our organization switched to Microsoft 365, which is apparently incompatible with Blackbaud. Help/support recommended clunky workarounds that don't actually work, rather than proactively enhancing compatibility
There should be a flag in constituent search to show which people in the results list are deceased.
Query isn't very user friendly. It should be simple to locate the information that you want to pull, and add parameters to that information. Instead you have to write multiple queries to set parameters, then write a query that looks at those other queries. It's time-consuming and easy to make mistakes, and the knowledge/proficiency is difficult to explain or transfer to new staff.
Blackbaud generally just feels like its technology is outdated. It wasn't built for the needs of a modern organization, and its developers have failed to make the necessary improvements over time to stay competitive.
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.
Data and settings are very customizable to fit the needs of our organization. We are able to not only keep track of donations, but also other interactions we may have with a constituent. Support is extremely helpful when issues arise.
I have not personally had to reach out to Blackbaud CRM Support, because we have a central office that manages the Blackbaud CRM relationship. However, any time I've reached out to our support team, there is nothing they can't figure out by utilizing the support they receive from Blackbaud CRM. I've not had any issues that have gone unresolved, and they can always get things done in a timely fashion.
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.
Most of our issues were self-inflicted and related to BB's work. We did not "staff up" correctly, our data to be converted was not in great shape and we set some unreasonable goals. With BBs help we were able to clean our data and prep it for conversion and we adjusted the goals to be more achievable with the timeline we were given. We found the BB staff to be responsive and focused, especially when working on-site with us.
Blackbaud CRM is more robust and has better functionality. It is necessary for a bigger fundraising shop. Blackbaud Raiser's Edge and NXT worked well in smaller organizations with fewer users and fewer donors/prospects. RE was more affordable than CRM was for the smaller organization.
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.
Change is always expensive and painful, but CRM is worth the time and effort. One immediate benefit is improved transparency internally, especially for internal accounting, controls, and compliance departments.
Cloud hosting helps cut cost and demand on organization staff. Improves access and meets compliance on every level.
Ability to make global changes to recording donor phone communication makes it a one-stop resource for a well-run development team.
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.