Bloomerang vs. Raklet Community & Membership Management Software

If you are a small organization just getting started, Bloomerang can be a good fit. It is simple and straightforward for development staff who maybe aren’t super savvy with data management or analysis in spreadsheets. In the sales demo they will try to upsell a lot of extras that are ultimately not necessary unless your stuff is very unfamiliar with database software. The base price of the software is something like $300 per year, as long as you mix all of the training and phone support add-ons they initially present you with.

Incentivized

Raklet Membership Management Software is most suitable for membership-based organizations like ourselves. If you want to create different membership plans and restrict some of the content for your paid members, Raklet can definitely be helpful. Also, our members were never this engaged before we decided on the solution. The membership management is off the hook; we can see all the activities of our members, and we don't need to manually correct their information, as they are able to update themselves. But if you want to sell physical goods to your members, you would need to use another marketing base besides Raklet Membership Management Software. We were able to go through, as we restricted some pages only to our paid members.

• Reporting: Once I understood the logic behind Bloomerang's reporting tools, I could not believe I'd ever worked a different way. Some of our funders request very complicated reports and getting the relevant data out of Bloomerang is SO much easier than it was with our previous CRM tools.
• Website integration: I love the tracking functionality that Bloomerang offers, as well as how easy it is to integrate event ticket, volunteer, and other forms into our existing website.
• Intuitive design: I've introduced total novices to Bloomerang and been very impressed with how quickly they've been able to figure out all the top level navigation as well as deeper functionality.

Incentivized

• Membership management
• Great customer service
• Value for money is off the chain
• All the necessary features are included

• Some of the searches did not bring up the expected results. It would be good to see the logic be a little more "fuzzy".
• More pre-set reports would be helpful for small organizations who do not understand the logic behind how to get the results they are seeking.
• An ability to just page through donor records would be nice. Sometimes you just want to browse the data to get inspired.

Incentivized

• An online store would be nice
• Separate section for newsletter subscriptions
• More payment getaway options

#1 - I am very happy with the product and support so far.
#2 - With significant data migration costs, I wouldn't even consider another option for at least 3 years no matter how much better it might be.

Incentivized

I have found no difficulty in using any of its features. However, I have been using constituent managementt databases for 10+ years, so I am accustomed to them, and to a great degree, there are a lot of similarities among the various platforms.

Incentivized

Any time i had a problem or question it has been easy to find an answer or tutorial. When I cannot find an answer, it is easy to email or live chat with support and they resolve my problems very quickly.

We left DonorPerfect for Bloomerang. I had come from an organization that used Raisers Edge and there was no way I was going to stay with DP. RE is great for larger organizations with staff dedicated to the database, but we were a much smaller organization and needed to have something we could all use easily. We demoed Salsa and Neon and liked them both, but Bloomerang had better integration features and seemed to be the most user-friendly.

Incentivized

We also evaluated those products before moving on with Raklet Membership Management Software. I would say the main problem is that these products are well-pronounced among membership management softwares. For this reason, first, their interfaces looked outdated and boring, and we would like to have a better landing page to promote our readers to visit our website. Secondly, they are not as flexible as we like them to be. Most of the other solutions offered one-for-all; we didn't feel like using them because we wanted something special and customized.

• Because my organization has been using Bloomerang for only one year, we haven't yet studied what impact it has had on our ROI. We have, however, noted that we are able to more efficiently and more rapidly communicate with constituents now than we were able to before we had Bloomerang. We can quickly and efficiently generate acknowledgements and tax receipts - and do so - better than we ever did before.

Incentivized

• Increased efficiency
• Affordable CRM solution
• Promote people to subscribe at our pages