The Blackbaud NetCommunity online alumni management system helps users to gain a deeper understanding of alumni relationships, execute multichannel engagement strategies, and eliminate tedious back-office tasks. Blackbaud NetCommunity provides tools to engage alumni and supporters, wherever they may be, helping users: Connect in person and create memorable alumni engagement events with online alumni management system tools to help foster a personal connection between alumni…
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Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Salesforce for Nonprofits, the Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud, is a nonprofit constituent relationship management platform from Salesforce, which supports constituent engagement, fundraising, and grants. Nonprofit editions contain Salesforce Lightning Edition along with the former Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) combined.
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.
If you only want to track donations, I'd go with something simpler. If you want to track donations and programs and connections between them, there may be nothing better. If you have no technical abilities and no budget, restricted yourself solely to what it does as described exactly in the manual. If you can't devote about 0.25FTE to the constant maintenance and upgrades, don't go with it.
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.
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
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.
I think Salesforce has so much functionality that it makes it difficult in terms of overall usability. Once you can figure it out, it's a 10/10, it's just getting there. If you're willing to do the work to figure it out then you're golden. For what it's worth, I don't know if you're going to find something with this level of functionality that's easier to figure out
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.
I have never had bad conversations with any support people with Salesforce but we also have not used them very much. I put it a little less because we are struggling to switch to lightning (some of our custom features do not migrate well) and it feels like the help and support for a little organization is not incredibly helpful unless we want to spend a lot of money.
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 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.
As a cloud native organization with no previous Microsoft infrastructure, Salesforce was a more logical and effective option for us. The suite of products was also far more comprehensive and required less customization. We were able to adopt a "configure not code" approach to our development of systems to support our mission that lowered the cost of upgrades.
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.
Salesforce has allowed us to easily track donor communications in one area, which I believe has improved our donor communication overall.
Salesforce for Nonprofits has made it easier on my org to track and pull donation-related information and has reduced the amount of time we need to do these regular tasks.
