Bonterra Guided Fundraising vs. Blackbaud TeamRaiser

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.

Incentivized

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.

• Top-notch customer service! The Network For Good team is responsive, genuinely courteous, and knowledgeable about the product.
• Communication options are available for all donor preferences, from good old-fashioned direct mail to email, text, and video. And all are easy to use!
• Creating forms for surveys and other data capturing is very easy, as is construction of reports on donors and donations for management use.
• Love the format options and drag-and-drop functionality -- including embedding videos -- for newsletters and email engagements.

Incentivized

• Offers the ability to really customize a campaign on TeamRaiser.
• Provides milestones/badges that can be earned for participants.
• Provides custom pages that can be easily linked to a campaign.
• Gives the ability to send coaching emails to participants and for participants to send emails through the TeamRaiser system.
• Has a big support community.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Too many options so it can be hard to navigate.
• Requires a deeper HTML understanding to really get the most out of it.
• Would be better if the interface was similar to other original Blackbaud products.

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.

Incentivized

Continued use will ensure an ongoing increase in this type of revenue and provides an alternative way of raising funds for our supporters.

It's very easy to use and customizable.

Incentivized

It can be overly complex and requires a deeper HTML understanding than most outside of IT have.

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.

Incentivized

Great and easy to access to get support to resolve issues immediately.

NFG is great and the process was smooth. thank you.

Incentivized

Having a better understanding of product and objectives prior to implementation would lead to more success.

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.

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Introduced our constituents to DIY fundraising.
• Provided another revenue stream that provides nearly $100,000 extra a year.
• Gets our constituents involved in the cause in another way.
• We've found a niche by using TeamRaiser in companies.
• Has provided more donor interaction for lower-tier giving groups that might otherwise receive little communication and stewardship from us.
• Seen returning participants raise more money year-after-year.

Incentivized