Bonterra EveryAction vs. Greater Giving vs. Virtuous CRM

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

For our organization, Greater Giving is the best option because of the credit card swiping, the ease of the registration, and the tax receipts alone. I do wish that it would allow us to pass on the credit card fees to the purchaser, but for that reason, we don't use it for registration. For an organization NOT needing to swipe credit cards at the event for on-site purchases or using their tax receipt software, I do think that there are more affordable options.

Incentivized

I think it's great for organizations that simply need to manage their donor base in a user-friendly way. If you treat all of your donors the same and do not do much segmented communication, Virtuous is great for you! if you do need segmentation, they need to improve their email marketing software. Also, if you plan to use other tools, they really lack any kind of integration, which is not ideal.

Incentivized

• One stop shop for creating newsletters, sending them out to mailing lists, and tracking analytics (including donations).
• Grants management (we are able to track funds received, reports due, and all points of contact associated with a given donor organization).
• Contact records (the new contact record feature makes it easy to find past donation history, demographic information, survey responses, communication preferences, etc. for a given contact. We are also able to import information from our donor prospect software into the contact record so everything is in one place).

Incentivized

• Website design is really easy and looks very professional.
• Data uploads and downloads are generally pretty easy.
• Process flows are nicely organized and easy for a non-technical person to figure out

• User-friendly CRM.
• Knowledgable support staff.
• Allows for email marketing on a mass level.

Incentivized

• Although Targeted Emails features is nice, I faced a lot of challenges with the formatting and editing text as a new user.
• With forms, it would be great to have options to create as signing-up (categories are editable instead of set)

Incentivized

• [I feel the] auction system is not as sophisticated as other systems
• Staff support structure
• Doesn't come out with updates very quickly [in my experience]

Incentivized

• Does not currently have action based/click based email marketing automation capabilities.
• Lacks integration with any other tools we/our nonprofits are using.
• Expensive, even just for the support they charge hourly.

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

Greater Giving is very intuitive. It’s easy to set up in the backend and change as needed. Anytime we couldn’t figure something out on our own, our customer service representative was always available and super helpful!

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

Online support was one of the worst customer service experiences I've ever had (I would give them a 1). Phone support and implementation support were very nice and knowledgeable.

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

Nation Builder—I would say this is a very pared-down version of VAN that requires extensions and outside software to do about 80% of what VAN can do natively. NB does have a better geocoding system that can geocode a location with just the address and does not require coordinates.

Incentivized

We currently use Eventbrite for our pre-event ticket and sponsorship sales as they have a much more streamlined webpage that is customizable, they allow us to pass on the fees to our purchasers, AND they do not charge an annual fee on top of the processing fees. However, they do not have the ability to let you swipe a credit card in advance - you need a membership to Bidding for Good to do so. We tried using Eventbrite and Bidding for Good for only 1 event before we switched back to Greater Giving. Neither platform allowed you to send out tax receipts and the on-site event management was subpar compared to the ease of Greater Giving.

Incentivized

I think the way to look at a CRM is really based on what provides the easiest user experience for you and your team. These days, they all do basically the same thing. Nothing about Virtuous stands out as significantly unique compared to the others. So if you like it, use it... but the others are just as good and actually have better integrations and more capabilities.

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

• Communicating with your audiences at a regular pace is a good thing, and Bonterra Development + Digital makes that easy enough to do. We see lower-than-normal open rates for our industry (per one study I read), but our overall reach is better than had we nothing. It's hard to give the credit for that to Bonterra Development + Digital.

Incentivized

• The reporting improved our abilities to provide accurate information more timely to the finance department - a plus when completing the annual 990 or other information for our auditors.
• We saw an increase in collecting on pledges when we switched from a "text-to-give" platform (from another provider) to incorporating all event elements into Greater Giving. We were able to capture over 95% of gifts within 48 hours of the event compared to less than half that amount in previous years.
• The reports generated by Greater Giving are better received by our board of directors - easier to digest and provide meaningful analytics

Incentivized

• Better donor management.
• Better predictive analytics on donors and giving numbers.
• Increases were seen in overall revenue since joining with Virtuous.

Incentivized