Bonterra Development + Digital vs. Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud

It is a great tool overall, but it is expensive. Selling it to management to keep as an expense for small nonprofits is challenging. It is a powerful mobilization tool and often underused when compared to the price tag, however. Moreover, it is cumbersome for new users to learn how to use it and there is little in the way of video tutorials.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Some people find the Create A List tool more intuitive than other record-querying equivalents, which can make it easier for digital organizers to target and segment bulk emails, broadcast texts, door-knocking sheets, etc.
• The ability to add custom fields on both Contact and Contribution records allows for some flexibility in making the system adapt to your organizing model
• There aren't a lot of other tools out there that make phone banking quite as accessible
• EveryAction's Email Series/Automations allow for some pretty sophisticated things to run mostly on their own, from welcome and reactivation series, to drip campaigns
• For the most technical EveryAction users, the ability to customize online form appearance and functionality using callback functions allows for pretty intricate customization of submitter experiences (e.g. redirecting form submitters to different destinations based on how they filled out the form)

• NPSP is designed to help with donor management.
• There are free add-ons for volunteer management.
• There is a new Program Management Module to better manage program participation and attendance.
• Campaigns help organize and report on marketing efforts though we use a third-party solution to send out marketing materials.

Incentivized

• Tech support resolutions and turnaround time (when going through basic channels).
• Continuity of the software—We recently lost a feature we had enjoyed for the first several months and were told that it is "not currently possible" with our version of VAN—even though we had it.
• I wish you could see ALL bulk uploads at ALL times, not just the last 100 batches or lines.

Incentivized

• Learning curve - very powerful, but takes time to learn
• Batch processing - takes time and advanced skills to reach efficiency for data entry and certain operations which you want to do in batch
• Mass email is extremely limited - must choose a third party tool which adds complexity and cost to the system

Incentivized

We will never us EA, nor recommend them to another org, simply based on their failed promises to deliver training, on-boarding and then charging our account during our free 3 month period, then after cancelling the contract their legal department tried to force us to sign a cancellation agreement that barred us from writing reviews, making comments, etc!

Incentivized

There is really no other tool to compare and especially since Salesforce for Nonprofits is free!!

Incentivized

It's just so easy--there isn't a lot of techy lingo or graphics, so a regular person can log in and have a sense of what does what. There might be a few terms you need to learn, but everything is in common English so you can almost always find what you're looking for.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I have found that system disruptions are rare and find that the communication from Bonterra Development + Digital in those instances to be informative and timely. I can only recall the system being down one or two times in the 8 plus years I have used Bonterra Development + Digital.

Incentivized

Will not go higher than 8 because of how often I end up locked out

Incentivized

I feel like product support and training should go hand in hand. Having to pay $5k to learn how to use a database is absolutely ridiculous and should be offered with the cost of your database, as it is with every other database I've ever used in the last 10 years of my career. With that being said, once I took the training, I found that the support was much more available. Having training and support behind a paywall is bad business in my opinion

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

They went through all the features and explained in easy-to-digest details what features the system had. They were also responsive to questions we had. We were able to check in with the support team after training and received prompt followups that helped supplement the training after we had real-world experience using the system.

Incentivized

We had some issues in the transition. The group that was contracted by EveryAction to transfer our data was not adequate. Information was misplaced, and everything took longer than it was supposed to. However, our personal EveryAction rep was fabulous, and eventually, they made everything right, including giving us some additional time with the rep.

Incentivized

Blackbaud is a Cadillac, and not needed by most small nonprofits of 3 million or less in income. We looked at several prior to choosing EveryAction. We are very pleased with EveryAction but wish that the training was more involved from a corporate perspective and that customer service could actually help more.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It just works whenever we need it. We'd grown our list and scaled up substantially since buying the product and have had no issues.

Incentivized

• It has saved me time because I can create events and connect Zoom directly and immediately save new contacts to my database from the registration.
• In targeted emails, we have been able to collect small dollars through low effort fundraising asks.
• Negative impact is many of our staff is not able to use it yet due to difficulty of navigation so they are going through user guides and tutorials and training to figure it out.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized