Bonterra Guided Fundraising offers a nonprofit fundraising suite of applications, with donor management features like intelligent tracking of donor readiness and targeted messaging.
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Constant Contact
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Constant Contact is a full-featured email marketing solution with capabilities such as social media integration, drag-and-drop editing, and real-time reporting. It is a bulk email tool designed for SMB customers. Since 2019, Constant Contact also offers marketing automation features, a website and landing page builder, and other tools to support midsize businesses.
$12
per month
Pricing
Bonterra Guided Fundraising
Constant Contact
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Lite
Starting at $12.00
per month
Standard
Starting at $35.00
per month
Premium
Starting at $80.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bonterra Guided Fundraising
Constant Contact
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
Pricing is based on how many contacts are imported into the Donor Management System. All packages have unlimited users, unlimited campaigns, unlimited peer-to-peer pages, unlimited emails and communications, and optional events and auctions. They all also include full support and complete data migration.
The SMS Marketing tool can be added to any Standard or Premium Constant Contact account. SMS is only available in the US for Standard and Premium paid plans. SMS can be added when logged in to an account after purchase. Plans start at $10/month for up to 500 messages.
To track my donor base for mailings, I use Microsoft Access and excel. For eblasts i use Mailchimp and Constant Contact. For letters i use microsoft word. Network for Good has all of these in one place in one program.
Network for Good has now allowed us to stop using Bloomerang and Constant Contact, allowing us to use one platform for donation and communicating with our donors, volunteers and adopters.
Network for Good has many additional services and is much more user friendly. They also have staff ready to help when needed without having to wait for days.
Network for Good specializes in what non-profits need. The others are just general business platforms, and one has to use a separate source for collecting donations, and they don't track those donations.
Network for Good is much more simple, modern and user friendly compared to etapestry. The features are more aligned with non-profit needs and not overly complicated. One major improvement from etapestry is that Network for Good has on-call help for free! is much more simple, …
Verified User
Director
Chose Bonterra Guided Fundraising
NFG had more fluidity between platforms and in it's communications. The others felt heavy handed as databases, but hard labor to create a simple letter to quickly email or print in real time. Thank you acknowledgements took two or three steps when in NFG you add a donation, …
I have looked into other options that offered online mobile giving platforms, but had not found them to be any better or more comprehensive than Network for Good. I apologize that I can't remember all that I looked into. In some cases, the others were much more expensive. They …
I have not used products like this other than Constant Contact. I did look into systems that integrated email marketing with the donor database along with other tools, but they were cost prohibitive when compared to the current options we are using from different companies. …
Specifically, the customer service is one of the best of any online service we have used. The staff is respectful and speedy, and I have never had any occasion to be disappointed in their help. The silent auction tool we have used for the past two online silent auctions has been excellent. We are about to use the new service. I've been working on setting it up, and so far, so good. We would really like to track our volunteers in Network for Good somehow. Not to do recruitment or volunteer forms, as we don't use public recruitment of volunteers for our use. However, volunteer hours are very important as we do fundraising and grantwriting, as they show our excellent relationship with the community. I'd like to be able to track the volunteer hours... especially if they are also donors. I sure would appreciate a REAL text-to-give, where it's not 10 numbers to text-to-give but just 6 or so. We have tried using this and the feedback we have gotten is "This isn't so easy." To be able to say: "Text MITTENS to 123456" is a lot cleaner than "Text MITTENS to 888-888-8888." Granted this is a small thing, but this is what people ask about.
Constant Contact is an excellent tool for sending out flyers and newsletters. However, I feel the content's appearance is typically all the same. When I receive an email from Constant Contact, I can immediately identify it - the templates usually all look the same. When sending out communications with images, it is easy to use Constant Contact and link webpages. However, the email layout is always vertical and can get very lengthy. I prefer a more flip-book approach with options to flip the page.
Market segmentation is great: my main segmentation is by region because that's how our sales team is divided.
Lists: making customized email lists is easy and intuitive; the custom fields allow some flexibility in case our fields don't exactly line up with Constant Contact's.
Campaigns: creating campaigns is quick and simple. I especially appreciate the 'resend to non-openers' option. I am constantly using this feature.
Subject line generator: I like using the recommended subject lines. I'm able to plug in their recommended ideas, or sometimes, this feature helps me generate my own ideas.
Individual contact listing being required before the company or business causes some business to be dropped if the individual leaves the business
when you have a donor who donated both as a business and as an individual sometimes one or the other does not come up in the listing when you search for an amount for the year
FaceBook donations being identified by at least who did the fundraiser, not the donors. I do a birthday fundraiser every year for Caring Carroll and there is no indication that it came from me. The money comes in but we do not know where it came from who held the fundraiser.
The fact that the FaceBook donations go into our Network for Good database before we even have the money is confusing.
It would be nice if we had more customizable options for emails - like moving around pictures and text boxes, rather than a set spot for everything to go.
I would like it if multiple people could work on a document at one time. So if I'm in charge of graphics, I can get those updated while someone else is entering content, etc.
We are still learning and rebuilding our nonprofit using this platform, so this year is a trial run to see how we can increase our network and our donations. So long as we are able to see a significant return on investment in terms of donations received through the platform, we will renew for next year.
There is no doubt that we are going to renew Constant Contact. We have not just invested a lot of time in learning and creating a great looking product but we have developed a strong database of information that allows us to track how we are doing for each newsletter. This supports our goals of creating products that residents desire and are excited to receive.
There is always room for improvement. I don't know how they test their systems, but they should invite not-so computer savvy people to test it. If I, as an expert have problems, they need to think like the technophobe. Since I've used Constant Contact in the past as part of my former employment, I have not viewed any of the tutorials and just jumped in to work on my client's newsletter. With that said, I found some areas easy and some a bit cumbersome
The system seemed quite slow sometimes. Specifically, there was sometimes a delay in sends if it was during a high traffic period. There were time-outs when uploading new code for an email, and a lag in reporting analytics which was sometimes as long as 72 hours
Bonterra customer service is slow and terrible. They take forever to address the actual issue, constantly making incorrect assumptions about the issue. I have spent more than 45 minutes on hold, just to speak with a customer service representative when the chat function was unable to provide assistance with my issue.
I think the overall support for Constant Contact has always been incredible; I have nothing negative to say. Our customer support representative was attentive, easy to understand, and very knowledgeable. I never felt like I wasn't a priority of his and my issues, while very small, were fixed in a very short time frame.
Implementation is very easy for someone who wants to send out the “batch and blast” type newsletters. If you want to use their templates with no customizations, the product works fine. However, the more customizations you get into involving link color, etc, that’s where things can get tricky for someone who may not be familiar with coding
For us, Bonterra Guided Fundraising offered the best overall bang for the buck. There were cheaper options that didn't over the features we needed and more expensive options that we felt didn't offer features as good as the ones we were seeing at Bonterra. For an overall option that did more of what we wanted to do, Bonterra was the best choice for us.
Constant Contact is much more intuitive for people who are not tech-savvy. Also, while sendgrid offered more options in it's drag and drop interface, it displayed differently across different email clients, which made it very cumbersome to use. It also took much longer to upload contact lists and it was harder to manage existing contacts. Performance in sendgrid was much slower as well, and the Preview feature was quite buggy. Our team initially chose sendgrid because of the integration options that it's API offered, but we ultimately switched to Constant Contact because it was much easier to build campaigns and better suited our requirements.
Very reliable in sending email campaigns and controlling the recipients so that no contact is sent the same email more than once, even if they are on a resent list
We signed up with Network for Good in the fall of 2022 & had a last minute end of year giving campaign using videos we made in Network for Good & emailing them. We also used giving pages & listed a variety of giving amounts that a donor could select.
We experienced at least a 20% increase in giving.
Increase in our communication with donors because there are tools in Network for Good that make it easy.
Our organization looks more professional with the giving pages & it accommodates ways to give.
I have had nothing but positive impacts from using Constant Contact.
The church is large, and there are many subgroups and axillary groups within the church. Setting up specific groups based on responsibility, interest, member goals, and service needs allows me to send information quickly, saving valuable time for other tasks.
Constant Contact allows leadership to stay personally engaged with the members I work with, without over-taxing my time. It feels so seamless.