Blackbaud eTapestry vs. Bloomerang CRM vs. DonorPerfect

As we are a small Foundation with only one Administrative Assistant, eTapestry is perfect for me to keep all of our CRM. Once I got used to how it worked, I found it to be user friendly. If I have any problems, I can either try to find the answer for myself in the extensive library, chat to support or email our Customer Service Representative with questions. I cannot fault either the Support team or Customer Service Representatives I have dealt with over the years as all of them have been knowledgeable and extremely helpful. I would prefer to have better options within the Email section as the templates are very basic. There is another option to use an eTapestry partner, but there are additional costs involved in that. The email templates are OK to use if you wish to send quick information to your database.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I love that I can integrate with Donor Search to learn about a person's past giving history to learn more about their interests. DonorPerfect also lets us upload a photo of our donors so we can easily identify them when they visit us or Attend a function. I wish the photo upload offered a larger image and multiple images, some donors send me pics of their visits and pets and it would be great to also store those right in their DP account.

• Report Scheduling is great. Reports can be scheduled daily (even on specific days of the week), weekly, or monthly) and auto-emailed.
• Reports can be displayed on the screen, downloaded, or emailed in CSV, excel, or pdf and can have columns pre-sorted in your preferred order.
• Online donations are automatically added to the donor's account and automatically create an account for a new donor.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• DonorPerfect is extremely customizable in every possible way. I love that you can customize what you see when you view a donor's record and how you see it. Fields can be active or hidden, and arranged in any way you choose. In addition, you can create custom fields and parameters, which can be used to enter text freely, as a drop-down box, or as selections with check boxes. The other awesome thing about the options for customization is that you can add, remove, or change fields at ANY time. My organization has used DonorPerfect for over 10 years, but just a few days ago, I added a field to the main screen in our donor records that is now relevant and helpful to my colleague and me as we work together. I feel like the possibilities are limitless in making it DonorPerfect your specific needs.
• DonorPerfect reports are extremely versatile, and can literally be created to produce any data set imaginable. You can create, name, rename, save, and delete any reports in your profile. You can run very broad, lengthy reports, (which generate surprisingly quickly!), or very specific, detailed reports. You can create and save filters for quick use, or start from scratch each time you run a report.

• When I started using eTapestry, you had to pay for courses to learn how to do more complicated things in the database. These courses were fairly expensive and our small organization couldn't afford that. I had to figure a lot out on my own or using the tech folks in chat or the odd free thing. Not sure if the courses are still costly or not.
• It is not particularly user friendly--for example, you would think the drag and drop email template would be pretty straightforward but it is not! And there aren't built in instructions to help as you try to use things.
• Figuring out how to organize queries and reports and communications in folders in order to find things again has been challenging. It is possible to search on keywords, which is very helpful. But finding something in a list of queries that is not alphabetical isn't particularly easy.

Incentivized

• Some of the searches did not bring up the expected results. It would be good to see the logic be a little more "fuzzy".
• More pre-set reports would be helpful for small organizations who do not understand the logic behind how to get the results they are seeking.
• An ability to just page through donor records would be nice. Sometimes you just want to browse the data to get inspired.

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• It could provide some of the standard reports fundraisers need as canned reports
• It could provide optional salutations so you could mail to only one person - not both
• It could enable us to set up monthly giving categories without using their donation program

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We do not always get positive solutions from Etapestry. There are a lot of resources and solutions that you can read about and reach out to. I participate in Community Forums and trainings to see what we can be doing differently.

Incentivized

#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.

Incentivized

It is by far the most cost-effective

Incentivized

eTapestry was the first donor database I had ever used and always found it to be much easier to use and administer than the databases I was used to (patient care and payroll databases). The rare times I can't figure out how to do something, I just hope on the chat and someone from the team pleasantly walks me through the process. If it's something that database is incapable of doing, they encourage me to log my suggestion in the idea bank so it can be considered for enhancements. On top of that, the regular training provided allows you to continue building your skills within the database

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Poor cash batch interface. Almost half of our receipts are generated by cash and this interface does not support our needs very well.

Incentivized

I have never had an issue accessing eTapestry. It does occasionally go down for maintenance. When that happens, they give you a lot of notice and generally schedule maintenance for hours between midnight and 6am so that business won't be disrupted.

Incentivized

It's always up when we need it. There are some errors that happen and are not reproducible and cannot be resolved. But [they are] very few and none that cause disruption for the organization.

Incentivized

The product does what it is supposed to, although there are downsides. There are positive and negatives for every product. This is less expensive alternative for a small organization tracking minimum information.

Incentivized

DonorPerfect is as reliable as your internet connection. It is a cloud based application and therefore you cannot pinpoint where the bottleneck is should you have one. But for the most part the app runs quickly.

Incentivized

My favorite feature is the Live Chat. If we get stuck, we can get immediate help, download the chat and save it for later so if we need help again we have it on file. The Knowledge Database is also extremely helpful.

Incentivized

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.

Support is so easy. We use chat most often - as we can get someone quickly. The support folks know the product and get answers quickly. If they need to escalate an issue, they do so quickly. The training is great and easily accessible. You can take classes over and over until you completely understand concepts

In person training is always helpful for a new product however I think that the online tutorials would do just fine.

Incentivized

I was able to utilize the support team to train me in areas where I could not figure out how to use the application.

Incentivized

They explained everything well to us throughout the process. It was easy to find resources needed to answer any questions that we had. Support was also available should we need further assistance from the resources found online. They were also quick to respond to our teams inquiries, which was much appreciated.

Incentivized

It was decent.

Incentivized

I was not there for the implementation of this platform. Unfortunately I am unable to just skip this question as it requires a response, which needs to be fifty characters, so here we are. At thirty four, I need to add a few more words to satisfy this requirement. Done.

Incentivized

DonorPerfect provides an extremely easy to use importing tool and the support team was awesome. You don't have to do it in house; for a reasonable fee you can get it done by them.

Incentivized

We have researched 2-3 other donor platforms and we just aren't at a place to change, although we are very tempted. eTapestry is getting us by for now and we don't look forward to the day when we have to change platforms and have to change things for our monthly donors. We worry about attrition if our donors have to change platforms.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have only ever used DonorPerfect, but I have looked into two or three other options over time. I apologize that I cannot recall all their names at this time. What I found was that even though they typically brought more to the table at that time, the cost jump was huge and I couldn't justify the ROI to myself. But DonorPerfect has continued to add to what they offer and I was glad I never changed platforms.

Incentivized

No, I would not change anything

Incentivized

The product overall is not too bad but I would not suggest for a large nonprofit organization.

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[There have been] only two outages since we have started using it and they were extremely information proactive. This should scale easily based on your internet connection.

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We didn’t use professional services

Incentivized

• Increased our capacity to fundraise.
• Allowed more opportunity to know our donors (tracking and data collection).
• Limited users - due to steep learning curve - as such less of our development staff know how to use the system to its fullest potential.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Positive - using a standard Donor management system across a wide geographic area has reduced our infrastructure costs and training requirements
• Negative - We are not realizing the full potential of our donors because we are missing opportunities for engagement, and missing connections and opportunities because DonorPerfect's limitations.
• Negative - Limited/poorly implemented API has significantly increased our development costs as we struggle to implement DonorPerfect data with other internal systems.

Incentivized