Bonterra Development + Digital enables nonprofits to increase efficiency, optimize supporter and prospect interactions, and raise more money by providing expansive fundraising, digital, and organizing tools on a unified CRM.
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Raiser's Edge
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Pricing
Bonterra Development + Digital
Raiser's Edge
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bonterra Development + Digital
Raiser's Edge
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
Contact team@info.bonterratech.com for more information about pricing.
EveryAction is the best of those I've worked with in terms of integration. It just works. It takes a little configuration to convert your files, but in the end, it is worth it. Nonprofits can go with cheaper solutions, like Salesforce, but unless you have coding knowledge, …
I have been a Raiser's Edge user for over 20 years. It was tough to convert to new platforms but when you work at smaller shops, there are budget limitations that make it cost prohibitive to use. I then spent at year completing a conversion to Salesforce, which was an awful …
Raiser's Edge is probably the highest functioning database that I've used and it has many positive qualities. I think overall it is a very useful and accurate product, though it could use several updates that other, newer CMS and databases have already instituted.
I have used the Bonterra Development + Digital tool at 4 different organizations since 2016. I think Bonterra Development + Digital is an excellent tool for smaller non-profit organizations as well as those organizations that have not used a CRM in the past. Its functionality, ease of use, and excellent customer support make it an excellent tool for small non-profit organizations. Once an organization has more than 5,000 donors/prospects the tool becomes less effective primarily because of the inability to track contacts, integrate with desktop email systems such as Outlook.
Raisers Edge is outstanding for storing and reporting on constituent data and communications. There are many options for creating methods of tracking by different information included and also for creating personalized tracking methods.
Raisers Edge is not very well suited for an organization that also has a gift shop and visitors center. Allowing membership admission and item sales is not practical.
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)
Event Summaries & Contributions - I wish we could add more than one contribution to an event at a time; this ends up taking hours to apply for donations.
Volunteer Activity and Scheduling - there is currently not a robust Volunteer section to schedule and track.
Faith Tracking - a space for churches, pastors, etc. would be great so we don't have to use Custom Contact Fields.
Planned Giving - needs a tab in the 'View All Details" view, currently only in 'View Contact Record" mode.
Primary Contact - needs multiple options with labels. We have many contacts at the same place and Relationships don't always have the right option.
Data posting to Financial Edge (FE) is limited and complicated to understand (took us time to adjust). The posting report does not have enough info: Appeal, campaign and who posted to FE. In genereral, RE/FE integration is not explained by Blackbaud properly, we had to figure out everything on the go.
Volunteer module is a bit cumbersome; some fields have duplicate fields in the event module; the identical information ends up being recorded in two different places.
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!
There are many CRM tools on the market however Raisers Edge especially with NXT offers everything you need in one database. It’s a little pricey however Blackbaud support is super helpful and they offer so many tools and add ins.
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.
it does lots of things well (prospect tracking and event management), some things FANTASTIC (gift records and donations and relationships). It is rigid enough for the database administrator to maintain good clean data, but flexible enought for customization across organizations so specific data can be kept as needed for YOUR specific organization needs.
On the whole, EveryAction has been very responsive. When we have had errors, they usually respond within a few days, and there have not been outages that I can recall. When they need to take the system down for maintenance, they always give plenty of notice
Since the software is expensive to use, only so many people are able to active users at once. There are times when I may have to wait or ask another user to log out so that I may log in.
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
For most users, only chat support is available. There is a phone number, but it is very labor-intensive to get someone on the phone, and the chat does not include an easy way to screen share. Those sessions need to be scheduled in advance and almost begged for; the chat line always has a long wait time, and sometimes it seems their support personnel is chatting with more than one client at a time.
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.
I expected more. We made the decision not to transfer data from my old system into EveryAction, starting fresh and new. But when we have sought assistance, it is rarely given. We are most often directed to the training videos. That component I will add, is very frustrating and upsetting.
It's critically important to consider where you are taking your fundraising efforts and strategy, and to collaborate closely with other departments who will also use RE. I would strongly recommend that you investigate best practices -both from Blackbaud (theory) and with other organizations (practice) - to create a user manual and guide for RE within your organization
EveryAction is just more accessible and intuitive to navigate. It is straightforward, easily embedded on our site, and easy for our new team members to familiarize themselves with the platform. Especially for the advocacy and form-building features, EveryAction has been the best tool our team has used thus far. We enjoy using EveryAction and will likely continue to do so.
Salesforce has a more modern feel and I felt that it was easier to perform functions beyond the basics, such as running reports for analysis, on Salesforce. But The Raisers Edge already existed at my company and given that I only needed it for basic functions and did not need much training to do those, I decided to use The Raisers Edge.
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.
It takes longer than necessary to do things so that makes it cost more staff time to complete the work we need. One example is with online gifts since you can't import these into a batch we have to manually add all of the online gifts which is time consuming.
