Designed for large, complex organizations as well as federated and international nonprofits.
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Bonterra Salsa
Score 7.6 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Bonterra Salsa is a donor and constituent management system that helps
nonprofits build donor profiles, track every interaction, cultivate major
gifts, and report on all development activities. The platform includes mobile-ready digital marketing tools for email, social, and online
donation forms.
Additional features
include donor cultivation, donation processing of all gift types, direct mail,
built in word processing, mail merge,
powerful query tool, event/auction…
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Pricing
Blackbaud Enterprise Fundraising CRM
Bonterra Salsa
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud Enterprise Fundraising CRM
Bonterra Salsa
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Blackbaud Enterprise Fundraising CRM
Bonterra Salsa
Considered Both Products
Blackbaud Enterprise Fundraising CRM
No answer on this topic
Bonterra Salsa
Verified User
Manager
Chose Bonterra Salsa
Salsa CRM is more flexible than Abila Fundraising 50. It is cloud based so that unlike locally installed Abila Fundraising 50 you can use it at the events and all donations at events are automatically entered. With Abila Fundraising 50 there was a clunky interface with Sage …
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
Well suited for sending mass emails or emails to certain groups, sending automated emails, collecting donations, and peer-to-peer communication. They have a good support team. I'm still figuring out how to best manage supporters, it's not as intuitive as I would like. I used to just manage all donor information on Google Sheets, and I still prefer Google Sheets.
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
User-Friendly. As a user, it is an intuitive product. When you are working, it is easy to navigate.
Fundraising Pages: Salsa Engage allows you to easily and quickly make fundraising pages that can be pushed out to your community of donors.
CRM: Easy to manage the constituents. When someone signs up for our fundraising pages, the software captures the demographics and either matches up to the existing donor or creates a new constituent.
Salsa CRM listens to their customers and works well with the user base. Most ideas are listened to and can see that requests are pushed out in updates.
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.
When we started with Salsa, not every option was available online, some were desktop specific. As it has been some time since I worked with Salsa these have probably been resolved.
The ability to communicate between Salsa CRM and other Salsa software options. Sometimes the crossover was not as efficient as was needed.
Tagging and setting up rules for particular donors was somewhat confusing - meaning, therefore, that the amount of training needed to implement the software was somewhat intensive.
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
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.
Their tech support is very good and I am very pleased with it. They speak in non-techie lingo for my non-techie staff just as easily as they speak techie to me (a techie). I appreciate their quick turn around in time to answer our questions and the follow up to make sure their answer(s) helped.
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.
I have reviewed Salsa Engage and perhaps after our transition has taken place it might be a viable option versus using Constant Contact for internal and external correspondence.
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.
