Blackbaud NetCommunity vs NetForum by Community Brands

• 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.).

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• Can store a lot of information. There are many different modules and each module has a lot of spaces for details such as birthday, gender, spouse and children's names, emergency contact information, photos and more.
• Can be linked to our internal systems. Our awards system is run through our organization's website but the winners are sent to netFORUM so that their records indicate the awards and distinctions they have achieved without us having to manually enter all of these.
• Can provide a lot of reporting information which is useful for data collection or year-end reporting needs.

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• NetCommunity has very simple analytics. It would be great to be able to see more in depth information on how constituents are reacting to the email they receive.
• Though it is simple to construct an email, making a complex design can be challenging due to the limitations of the design tool.
• Although A/B testing is available within NetCommunity, it is not easy to set up.

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• The queries and reports are not user-friendly. One really needs to understand the search terminology to run queries and reports.
• There is no way to prevent duplicates so if someone enters an updated address for a member but creates a new record instead of updating the current record, there are now two records for that person which makes some of the data difficult to sift through.
• Linking members to their organization is difficult because if someone enters an organization slightly differently from the way it is registered in netFORUM, the person will not be linked to the organization and the reports that say how many members come from a specific institution is now inaccurate.

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• 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.

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• Easier to see expiring or expired memberships and initiate the renewal process
• Streamlining of data increases employee efficiency
• Difficulty in using it to its full potential means that the total possible ROI may not be achieved

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