Designed for large, complex organizations as well as federated and international nonprofits.
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Bonterra EveryAction
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Bonterra EveryAction enables nonprofits to increase efficiency, optimize supporter and prospect interactions, and raise more money by providing expansive fundraising, digital, and organizing tools on a unified CRM.
In addition to the products listed above, I have also used many proprietary tools developed by the organization. I find Bonterra Development + Digital to be easy to setup and use, especially for smaller organizations with limited staff and resources. Many nonprofits are unable …
I used Blackbaud at a University setting, which I believe was very appropriate. The database needed many people that were just in charge of keeping the database clean - so for a large organization, it worked well. However, for a small organization it would be far too complicated.
EveryAction had much better backend user interface and data management features compared to Blackbaud, and is easier to use, quicker to migrate, and cheaper than Salesforce. EveryAction lacks Salesforce's robust online community of users/online documentation. It's not as well …
I have been a Raiser's Edge user for over 20 years. It was tough to convert to new platforms but when you work at smaller shops, there are budget limitations that make it cost prohibitive to use. I then spent at year completing a conversion to Salesforce, which was an awful …
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
Bonterra EveryAction is a good CRM to use if your company has institutional fundraisers, grants, and individual fundraising, as it is suited to manage the processes that go along with all of those. I've heard that SalesForce has more functionality than Bonterra EveryAction, but I think that Bonterra EveryAction has plenty to learn and is extremely useful.
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
One stop shop for creating newsletters, sending them out to mailing lists, and tracking analytics (including donations).
Grants management (we are able to track funds received, reports due, and all points of contact associated with a given donor organization).
Contact records (the new contact record feature makes it easy to find past donation history, demographic information, survey responses, communication preferences, etc. for a given contact. We are also able to import information from our donor prospect software into the contact record so everything is in one place).
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
We will never us EA, nor recommend them to another org, simply based on their failed promises to deliver training, on-boarding and then charging our account during our free 3 month period, then after cancelling the contract their legal department tried to force us to sign a cancellation agreement that barred us from writing reviews, making comments, etc!
It's just so easy--there isn't a lot of techy lingo or graphics, so a regular person can log in and have a sense of what does what. There might be a few terms you need to learn, but everything is in common English so you can almost always find what you're looking for.
The only issue I have had with availability is when I don't have my work phone with me, which prevents me from providing a multi-factor authentication code to access the portal. Other than that, I have not had an issue with availability or outages.
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.
I feel like product support and training should go hand in hand. Having to pay $5k to learn how to use a database is absolutely ridiculous and should be offered with the cost of your database, as it is with every other database I've ever used in the last 10 years of my career. With that being said, once I took the training, I found that the support was much more available. Having training and support behind a paywall is bad business in my opinion
They went through all the features and explained in easy-to-digest details what features the system had. They were also responsive to questions we had. We were able to check in with the support team after training and received prompt followups that helped supplement the training after we had real-world experience using the system.
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.
It natively integrated with NGP Van extremely well. it also integrated very well with our zoom platform and our use of the Mobilize platform. The bulk upload feature allowed us to move large amounts of initial data into the platform easily. The removal of duplicates was also a fairly easy task.
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.
Nation Builder—I would say this is a very pared-down version of VAN that requires extensions and outside software to do about 80% of what VAN can do natively. NB does have a better geocoding system that can geocode a location with just the address and does not require coordinates.
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.
Communicating with your audiences at a regular pace is a good thing, and Bonterra Development + Digital makes that easy enough to do. We see lower-than-normal open rates for our industry (per one study I read), but our overall reach is better than had we nothing. It's hard to give the credit for that to Bonterra Development + Digital.
