Bonterra EveryAction vs. Foundant Grant Lifecycle Manager

Bonterra EveryAction is a good CRM to use if your company has institutional fundraisers, grants, and individual fundraising, as it is suited to manage the processes that go along with all of those. I've heard that SalesForce has more functionality than Bonterra EveryAction, but I think that Bonterra EveryAction has plenty to learn and is extremely useful.

Incentivized

This product is great and well-suited for smaller organizations who are interested in doing an online grantmaking system for the first time or upgrading from a simple survey-type application. You would love this product for basic applications and reports; [...] [its also great] if you want to do some light reporting. This is not a product that is robust enough to handle complex budgets, contact or email management, or complex outcomes metrics. It also will not work if you are trying to track your conversations with potential grantees before they apply.

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)

• Customer Service: Foundant is always super helpful and speedy in their responses to my questions, whether it's an email or call.
• Connections to other users: There's a great online community that's willing to share what works for their organizations.
• Company Response/Development: Foundant is continually updating (where it needs to) to make their product the best it can be, and is willing (and does) take comments and suggestions from clients for how the software could be improved.
• Training: A variety of training options- ranging from in person conferences to web-based tutorials. Very helpful, and updated as the product is.

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

• I don't think about what's lacking. This is much better than our previous grants management software.
• The landing page could have a snappier design.
• I wish our grantees could see more than one follow-up for a process at a time. Sometimes there needs to be a project mod submitted while that is an active renewal going on.

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

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

The only issue I have had with availability is when I don't have my work phone with me, which prevents me from providing a multi-factor authentication code to access the portal. Other than that, I have not had an issue with availability or outages.

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

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

It natively integrated with NGP Van extremely well. it also integrated very well with our zoom platform and our use of the Mobilize platform. The bulk upload feature allowed us to move large amounts of initial data into the platform easily. The removal of duplicates was also a fairly easy task.

Incentivized

I liked Action Network in that it was very user friendly. However, it didn't have the magnitude of features that EveryAction provides. But I appreciated the level of basic knowledge needed to use this to its extent of services. I kind of miss how easy it was to navigate and create when writing a newsletter. EveryAction has the special features that I need to update such as the domain.

Incentivized

I used GIFTS more than 10 years ago. Their development was glacial, and it was clumsy software. They took much longer to develop the on-line application process.
I also reviewed Philan Tech. They did not offer the same flexibility that Foundant's GLM did. Nor did the company have the depth of software engineering experience that Philan Tech had at the time.
Finally, I used a back-office support company for a short time that has an on-line grant management component. This option proved to be too cumbersome and too expensive. And I did not personally get along with the staff there. Definitely not a good fit for the Replogle Foundation and me.

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

• We are able to make informed fundraising decisions. We can easily see what campaigns were successful so that we know where to invest our time. We expect to see improved fundraising performance.
• Saving time on data collection: Having automated reports on donations and grant funds raised is a huge time saver. Rather than spending hours once a quarter pulling information out of a bulky Excel sheet, we can simply refresh the reports we've set up and visualize the data anytime.
• Saved money on other softwares since Bonterra EveryAction is a one stop shop: We've been able to cancel the subscription to our email marketing company since we send all our campaigns through the software. We are also able to send surveys and to host our donation page.

Incentivized

• This software has made it much easier to work with reviewers (panels of community volunteers who provide scores and comments for the grant applications). While we only use the Evaluator function for two of our many grant programs, the merge templates have saved a lot of time in assembling the materials to send digitally (one PDF per application) for the other grant programs. In our old database, I had to download each document from the application, convert to PDF, then combine. That was very labor intensive! In this software, I create a merge template and all the documents that I want included are automatically converted to PDF, in the order I want them. This was a big reason we moved to this software and it continues to be a fantastic feature.
• The automatic email reminders that have been built into the software (this is one example of an excellent improvement that has been added since we got the software - showing their constant efforts to get even better) have saved a lot of time and effort. I used to set reminders on my calendar every year to write a long involved email to all the grantees for a particular grant program, to remind them to submit their grant reports. And then, if they still forgot, I had to chase them down. Now, I just set up the reports in the software and there is an automatic reminder that goes out two weeks before; if they still forget, there is an automatic reminder that goes out one day after the deadline to let them know that it's late. I still have to chase a few of them down but the majority are taken care of.

Incentivized