Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review I have used the Bonterra Development + Digital tool at 4 different organizations since 2016. I think Bonterra Development + Digital is an excellent tool for smaller non-profit organizations as well as those organizations that have not used a CRM in the past. Its functionality, ease of use, and excellent customer support make it an excellent tool for small non-profit organizations. Once an organization has more than 5,000 donors/prospects the tool becomes less effective primarily because of the inability to track contacts, integrate with desktop email systems such as Outlook.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Some people find the Create A List tool more intuitive than other record-querying equivalents, which can make it easier for digital organizers to target and segment bulk emails, broadcast texts, door-knocking sheets, etc. The ability to add custom fields on both Contact and Contribution records allows for some flexibility in making the system adapt to your organizing model There aren't a lot of other tools out there that make phone banking quite as accessible EveryAction's Email Series/Automations allow for some pretty sophisticated things to run mostly on their own, from welcome and reactivation series, to drip campaigns For the most technical EveryAction users, the ability to customize online form appearance and functionality using callback functions allows for pretty intricate customization of submitter experiences (e.g. redirecting form submitters to different destinations based on how they filled out the form) Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Event Summaries & Contributions - I wish we could add more than one contribution to an event at a time; this ends up taking hours to apply for donations. Volunteer Activity and Scheduling - there is currently not a robust Volunteer section to schedule and track. Faith Tracking - a space for churches, pastors, etc. would be great so we don't have to use Custom Contact Fields. Planned Giving - needs a tab in the 'View All Details" view, currently only in 'View Contact Record" mode. Primary Contact - needs multiple options with labels. We have many contacts at the same place and Relationships don't always have the right option. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review 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!
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review On the whole, EveryAction has been very responsive. When we have had errors, they usually respond within a few days, and there have not been outages that I can recall. When they need to take the system down for maintenance, they always give plenty of notice
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Will not go higher than 8 because of how often I end up locked out
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review 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
Read full review In-Person Training In person training is always helpful for a new product however I think that the online tutorials would do just fine.
Read full review Online Training The online tutorials were easy to follow and explained in detail steps. I was able to put together an organization SOP for best practices in case I was not in the office or no longer there.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review I expected more. We made the decision not to transfer data from my old system into EveryAction, starting fresh and new. But when we have sought assistance, it is rarely given. We are most often directed to the training videos. That component I will add, is very frustrating and upsetting.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review EveryAction is just more accessible and intuitive to navigate. It is straightforward, easily embedded on our site, and easy for our new team members to familiarize themselves with the platform. Especially for the advocacy and form-building features, EveryAction has been the best tool our team has used thus far. We enjoy using EveryAction and will likely continue to do so.
Read full review Scalability The product allows us flexibility and scalability for our team.
Brittany Beltz Assistant Director of Annual Giving and Stewardship Manager
Read full review It just works whenever we need it. We'd grown our list and scaled up substantially since buying the product and have had no issues.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review It has saved me time because I can create events and connect Zoom directly and immediately save new contacts to my database from the registration. In targeted emails, we have been able to collect small dollars through low effort fundraising asks. Negative impact is many of our staff is not able to use it yet due to difficulty of navigation so they are going through user guides and tutorials and training to figure it out. Read full review ScreenShots Blackbaud eTapestry Screenshots Bonterra Development + Digital Screenshots