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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Blackbaud TeamRaiser
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Blackbaud's TeamRaiser is a peer-to-peer fundraising platform, support event fundraising with registration, analytics, and campaign management tools.
A scenario in which Bonterra Development + Digital EveryAction is extremely applicable, is creating an event, creating a call list for outreach to people for that event, creating an email list to generate RSVPs for that event and creating a central tracking location for all RSVPs and outreach correspondence. It is less appropriate, if the event is small scale among highly connected individuals who are already on a personal basis with each other.
TeamRaiser is well suited for peer-to-peer fundraising activities, such as large pledge-based events like walks and runs or DIY fundraisers of many different types.
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).
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.
Very rarely do I run into an issue when accessing Bonterra Development + Digital. Cookies are sometimes finicky and cause login issues. Otherwise, maintenance is normally communicated with users and I don't recall Bonterra Development + Digital being down in the recent past outside of scheduled maintenance.
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 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.
As stated previously, I have set up Bonterra Development + Digital for at least 4 organizations. In addition, I have recommended Bonterra Development + Digital to at least 5 other organizations. In my opinion, Bonterra Development + Digital is the best tool for smaller organizations and those new to CRMs and donor tracking. I have found the implementation process to be very efficient and the implementation staff to be very easy to work with.
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.
While everydayheroPro and CrowdRise are easy to set up, already mobile friendly, have great interfaces, and are customizable, they lack some base capabilities that come with TeamRaiser, such as the ability to control the donation form, email capability, database syncing, badges/milestones, and custom pages. The everydayheroPro system has great potential, and we use it for our smaller DIY campaigns, but its support knowledge bank and customization is still so limited and can be frustrating to use because of it.
EveryAction's positive impacts are usually felt in the sophistication of outreach, which, when done right, translates into better engagement, leadership development, and even cold hard cash. Being able to tailor outreach and mobilization based on something close to a full picture of each supporter is the best way to identify candidates for moving up ladders of engagement (aka "conversion"). Automations and other functionality can free up organizers' time, but in general my experience has been that folks get more busy rather than less, with all the possibilities that emerge.
EveryAction's more immediate negative impacts have to do with admins' user experience. Feelings of overwhelm at the scope of the tool and frustration at the experience of support can lead folks to just reduce or stop altogether their engagement with EveryAction. Unfortunately, even when it's working perfectly, the tool is only as good as the data being entered and managed within it. So if folks aren't fully adopting EveryAction because of the initial experience, that neglect will just reinforce the negative experience, because it won't have the data it needs to work the way it's intended. That CRM death-cycle is extremely costly, and while some of the responsibility lies on us to commit our staff and volunteers to using our tools correctly, there's only so much we can do when aspects outside of our control (like support) erode our stakeholders' faith.
EveryAction also has some indirect negative impacts on the organizing tool marketplace as a whole. It's not EveryAction's fault that you can't effectively organize without a bunch of different types of outreach these days. But in buying up all the competition in the progressive space (Blue State Digital, Action Kit, Mobilize), and insisting on cramming in all these different types of outreach into one tool, in my opinion, it's behaving like a monopoly, and making it more expensive and more complicated to do our work than would otherwise have been the case. To me, that increases the barrier to entry for smaller organizations, which often translates to those run by and in service of the most underserved and historically oppressed communities.
