The Blackbaud NetCommunity online alumni management system helped users to gain a deeper understanding of alumni relationships. The product is being phased out, and is no longer offered to new customers.
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Bonterra Network for Good
Score 9.4 out of 10
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Bonterra Network for Good offers a nonprofit fundraising suite of applications, with donor management features like intelligent tracking of donor readiness and targeted messaging.
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Pricing
Blackbaud NetCommunity (discontinued)
Bonterra Network for Good
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud NetCommunity (discontinued)
Bonterra Network for Good
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$500
Additional Details
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Pricing is based on how many contacts are imported into the Donor Management System. All packages have unlimited users, unlimited campaigns, unlimited peer-to-peer pages, unlimited emails and communications, and optional events and auctions. All packages also include support and data migration.
For those using the events module, NetCommunity is great, though if you do a lot of walk/run type of events where individuals sponsor other individuals, something like TeamRaiser might make more sense. If you don't have the staff resources for web developers dedicated to fundraising tasks, then NetCommunity is a great tool. It's not as customisable as an experienced programmer/developer might want, but it still has a lot of options. It also has a lot of nuance, and if you cannot make an investment of time or money into getting staff trained, it's not going to work out well.
We have a small team leading our international nonprofit. Bonterra Network for Good allows us to keep track of our donations quickly and easily, including private donors, larger donor-advised funds, foundations and grants, and easily designate the donation to different campaigns or sub-categories within our organization. The platform syncs well with Quickbooks and we rarely have issues. The issues we do have are always around pulling reports. The platform does not make it easy to pull a quick report, even with suggested filters provided.
Data integration with The Raiser's Edge - data which is collected in Blackbaud NetCommunity directly integrates with The Raiser's Edge interface and can be seamlessly downloaded into the CRM.
Donation/Event/Membership registration - the product comes with out-of-the-box forms that can be used for these basic functions. They are flexible, but structured enough to integrate the data back to the CRM.
Email marketing - constituents can be emailed directly from the Blackbaud NetCommunity platform by querying the data available in the CRM. Targeted email communications can be setup as well as ongoing subscriptions/newsetters.
Content management - general tools to manage content are available. Business users can add/modify/delete this content without tremendous technical expertise. The content can also be shared across multiple websites - or A/B split tested to determine preference.
Friendly URLs - the product allows for friendly URLs that are also more searchable on the major search engines (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.).
When we have carding attacks on our payment gateway it is always a struggle to get all the players to work together and determine how to get us back up and running. ReCAPTCHA at the highest level is not supported, for example.
From experience, the product has not been stable in the last couple years and all signs have been pointing towards a sunsetting of this product for years.
In exporting reports, it would be helpful to have a "select all" option so you can easily select everything without having to manually click each one.
In exporting reports, it may be helpful to have the option of saving various options for different needs so you don't have to manually click or unclick each choice every time, as you can currently only save one type.
It would be helpful to be able to change an event/ticket information after it has already gone live for sales as we recently had an issue with this.
The only reason for this is due to the fact that we are only using the product for a specific purpose that is not directly tied to the newsletters. There are better products out there for what we are doing with grant processing. We will most likely move to a new software instead of renewing for our purposes
We are still learning and rebuilding our nonprofit using this platform, so this year is a trial run to see how we can increase our network and our donations. So long as we are able to see a significant return on investment in terms of donations received through the platform, we will renew for next year.
The interface with Raiser's Edge and the many different ways our users can interact with the website are a big plus for us. Event registrations are our most popular transaction type and having this on line makes our lives much easier.
There is no perfect all-in-one product that works for every organization. We enjoyed using Network for Good. I am giving it a 9 because the cost was out of our range, and the peer-to-peer options (at the time) were limited. We were not able to make it work for our peer-to-peer event. We also weren't thrilled with the online forms. However, the donation pages, donor profiles, and communication tools were excellent.
Product is stable is up 99.99% of the time. As a hosted customer, we do experience some minor downtime when routers or switches malfunction. We feel the downtime has been minimal and the communications around these outages has been good.
In 5+ years we have never had an issue with it not working when we needed it to. It is very reliable and doesn't seem to have a lot of bugs or interruptions in service.
Blackbaud NetCommunity uses .NET technology. It can be sluggish at times if not optimized, but overall we have been pleased with the performance when handling large volumes of traffic.
It is always fast for us and reports have a very quick upload time. We don't integrate it into other programs so I'm not 100% sure about that, but it always works when we use it and is very reliable. Even when we run Excel files for complete information on donors, it always works very fast.
Blackbaud NetCommunity and all of the Blackbaud products have a great support system. Blackbaud NetCommunity offers support through phone calls, chats, online, and email. Their response time is very quick and the support analysts work with you to resolve issues in a very timely matter. If they do not personally know the answer they will direct you to another support analyst that will be able to assist in a resolution.
Most of the time they are quick and friendly and help me resolve any issues. There have only been a couple of times that we couldn't find a resolution and I was just told that NFG didn't have that capability.
I truly wish that "0" was an option. I never really pin-pointed whether the implementation issues that we had were caused by Blackbaud, or if it was part of a larger issue that began in-house.
We only had one hiccup with the domain that was an issue on our end but NFG struggled to help us. It was finally resolved and we've been good ever since
We tried to use this for a while and actually had different groups set up to begin implementing the interface into our computer but for some reason, we could not get a handle on it. iMIS ended up winning out in the long run because it was easier for people of all generations to use and understand. People just preferred the layout and the usability so ultimately it was kept as our main system.
We used Little Green Light for several years at a previous employer. LGL did not have the extensive integration capabilities or the level of sophistication that BGF has in terms of email, video, donor campaign pages, and exceptional customer support. For these reasons, we chose to go with BGF instead of LGL.
We were able to purchase a package integrating all types of Blackbaud products which integrate.
We are able to update our desktop, mobile donation pages which allow us to take donations while having great support available at all times.
The donation forms and email tools are not very visually appealing and user-friendly so this makes it difficult to implement and in return donors don't have a user-friendly experience.
Minimized the resources necessary to run an online presence. For instance, one moderately tech-savvy person can handle it.
Provides a pathway to increase the number of events the organization can manage.
By being part of a larger group of non-profits that utilize Network For The Good, we receive additional assistance and ideas from related organizations.
