Blackbaud NetCommunity vs. Give Lively

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.

Incentivized

If you’re not using another service or CRM to manage online forms, then you’ll need something like Give Lively. However, there are so many products with robust feature lineups that can be used to centralize work efforts that a singularly faceted product falls flat.

Incentivized

• 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.).

• It’s an effective form for donations
• Integrates well with our payment processor stripe

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The reporting functionality leaves something to be desired. In my opinion, it's hard to find and confusing to understand what timeframe you’re looking at.
• It’d be nice to be able to customize export fields before download. There’s a lot of extra info provided to sift through.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I feel this product is much less user friendly than others I’ve used in its place. I feel I spend too much time searching the overly complicated navigation menus and dealing with export cleanup.

Incentivized

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.

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.

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.

Incentivized

As expected. Courseware was a nice reference guide.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I think Little Green Light will be a better alternative. We are currently building the online form so that our donation landing page can link directly with LGL and we’re hoping to cut Give Lively as the middleman platform out of our tech stack.

Incentivized

• 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.

• It’s our current donation platform which is a huge benefit to have an online presence that doesn’t involve QR codes and Venmo accounts
• Expands constituents ability to give in other ways beyond cash or check donations

Incentivized