Bonterra EveryAction 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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FrontStream Panorama
Score 3.1 out of 10
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FrontStream boasts over 20,000 nonprofits and socially-minded companies as users, to power their auctions, charity events, peer-to-peer and online fundraising, and employee giving. Panorama's interactive web interface helps nonprofits expand their donor base, manage event registration and donor communications. With prebuilt customized templates, users can create branded, personalized nonprofit page where they can tell a meaningful, personal story about their cause and create the…
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.
Given the experience I have had this year, I couldn't recommend any part of their service. The product doesn't function as advertised and they don't communicate with customers to let them know what they are doing to fix it. It is a level of service that is completely unacceptable on every level.
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)
FrontStream Panorama allows you to customize a larger portion of your pages that you design if you have experience with HTML and coding.
FrontStream Panorama allows you to integrate their other platforms, such as bidding for good, which is for auction items, and connect those to their ticket registration software.
FrontStream Panorama allows you to pull reports and customize and save reports you might use often.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
They do not seem to care about the problems of their customers. They do not return phone calls. They do not provide the updates on their support page that they promised. They have had two weeks to repair the basic functionality of their system and they have been unable to do so. This is a complete failure as far as I am concerned.
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.
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.
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.
We switched from Classy.org to FrontStream Panorama and then back to Classy.org. But, originally what intrigued us about FrontStream Panorama was the ability to customize our fundraising pages. Visual design is so important to storytelling and to raising revenue and it seemed like a real opportunity for us to create beautiful campaigns that raised more money. They were also slightly less expensive than competitors.
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.
