Blackbaud Online Express vs. Neon Fundraise

For 100% tax-deductible donations, I 9.5/10 recommend Blackbaud Online Express. The only thing is that it does not charge debit cards automatically, so I have to do it myself. Using Blackbaud Online Express forms for events gets more complicated. The way events work in Raiser's Edge in general is already complicated, so maybe it's more on Raiser's Edge than it is Blackbaud Online Express.

Incentivized

Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound) is well suited to third-party fundraising. We use it for our walk fundraiser, and we enjoy the level of interactivity and customization it offers our constituents. It also makes donation entry and reporting fairly easy, so it would be well suited for operations with vast numbers of donations in cash, check, and credit. It might be less suited to events with a handful of large donations from corporate benefactors.

Incentivized

• Online donation forms are easy to create and place within our existing website. The donations received are easily transferred into our Raiser's Edge database.
• Creating email communications for our constituents is very simple to achieve in Online Express and the statistics provided are very helpful to see what our constituents are clicking on.

Incentivized

• Rallybound is able to have websites that are user-friendly to our participants. Our participants are able to navigate through their profiles with ease. With our participants able to easily navigate their pages, the staff is able to spend less time asking questions and instead coach their fundraising efforts.
• Rallybound is able to customize your website to your needs, for a fee of course. Rallybound is also able to customize certain reports for you if that specific report has not already been created. This is essential for my team when pulling revenue numbers or projecting future revenue/budgets.
• Rallybound's customer service is quick to respond and helps navigate issues. This is crucial when you are on-site at an event trying to solve a problem.
• Rallybound allows you to check-in individuals based off of the registration on their website. Their check-in is so simple and easy to use.

Incentivized

• It does have some "quirks." It can be a little tricky to process the batch until you have done it a few times.
• I had a problem finding a constituent yesterday - he was purchasing a program ad for an event - that I knew was in the database. It turned out that he had been marked inactive, and so apparently wasn't included in the search results.

Incentivized

• Communication around new features and updates could be better.
• Ticketed event pages could have more custom options.

Incentivized

Customer service for all of Blackbaud's products has really lacked over the years. They are starting to get better in the last year but it can very frustrating. The online knowledge base community is the best resource for information. At times it can take hours for a customer sect even rep to help with questions or problems which is not at all ideal in this industry.

Incentivized

Blackbaud Online Express is mainly used strictly because of its integration with Raiser's Edge. If a client uses Salesforce for constituent/lead management, other products can offer more flexibility in designing donation forms, email templates, etc. However, they all have their own negatives in Salesforce integration -- that is a whole other can of worms. While the Raiser's Edge integration of Online Express isn't perfect, it is relatively painless compared to the competition's Salesforce integration. Also, for NFP's, Blackbaud's NFP focused business model is a plus.

Incentivized

I was not a part of the evaluation process when Rallybound was selected. Classy was one of our top three choices, however, when we decided to eventually go with Rallybound. I do know that my team continues to look for the best platform to use, and Classy is always discussed.

Incentivized

• Regardless of project or initiative, all fund-raising efforts are managed in one place for the entire organization.
• Donor management is concise, thorough, and systematic - no individual or organization is overlooked.
• Snapshot reporting of successful grant applications and fund-raising are readily available.

Incentivized

• Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound) has reduced the staff burden of data entry by making more available to secondary admins and users.
• Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound) has improved the quality of the analysis of data from our walks.
• We have been able to surpass our expectations for peer-to-peer fundraising in a year affected by the pandemic.

Incentivized