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…
It was selected many years ago and there are better products in the 3 spaces we use BBNC for... but will miss having one product for all and the ease of integration with other Blackbaud products.
We started out with Blackbaud NetCommunity but eventually switched to Blackbaud's Online Express. Online Express offered more features and was included with the upgrade to Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge NXT. Blackbaud NetCommunity did meet most of our needs and was a great …
We use NC Spark in combination with other tools: Raiser's Edge, Team Raiser (a portion of Luminate Online). We got it in a package with Raiser's Edge. Without the peer-to-peer fundraising functionality it cannot be the only stand alone tool for fundraising. It also lacks a lot …
Blackbaud Netcommunity was selected because it integrates fully with Raiser's Edge. i-Modules and MailChimp are more flexible in terms of design and they have better analytics, but they do not integrate.
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 …
We utilize multiple Blackbaud products including Raiser's, target analytics, NXT, NetCommunity, TeamRaiser so this allows us to have a cohesive package with all solutions that integrate. NetCommunity is a lot more expensive however it's worth it if you are looking to have one …
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Chose Blackbaud NetCommunity
To be honest, I have not had to research any other products, because we were already using NetComunity and did not feel it necessary to seek out alternatives.
We use them for different purposes. Mobile Pay allows us to take payments at events for the donor rather than directing them to a site. It makes it fast and simple but it does not have a great comprehensive report for importing.
SilverPop seems to be much easier to use when it comes to newsletters. It also moves all of the mail sending activity out of our domain and ip addresses. Due to this fact alone we have had much less spam and have not had our ip addresses or domain name listed on spam lists.
Convio is the only other portal I'm very familiar with. While it can handle donations, it can't do much more. NetCommunity is just unbeatable for educational institutions that manage constant mass email, a restricted constituency, and levels of security. It integrates with RE …
We switched away from NetCommunity 9 months ago to begin using HubSpot. NetCommunity isn't a bad product, but it just didn't perform the way we needed it to.
We evaluated a number of open source products (i.e. Drupal, WordPress) as well as a few commercial options (i.e. SiteCore). In the end, Blackbaud has built an integrated product in NetCommunity. We found that the features in the 'Pro' version were exactly what we are looking …
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.
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.
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 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.
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.