Bonterra Network for Good vs. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

I used Network for the Good to run a fundraising event it was awesome. My organization is part of a larger regional non-profit dedicated to servicing those in our community who need a little help. By banding together under a larger regional organization, we can extend our impact through the utilization of Network for the Good across all associated organizations. It empowers smaller groups to have a larger impact on their community.

Incentivized

I’d say it’s very well suited for organizations looking to move toward AI integrations and make more data-driven decisions. As I mentioned, I’ve also used the competing product from Blackbaud, which is a very closed system — you can’t really pull out the data. Salesforce, on the other hand, has a big advantage with its APIs, allowing you to extract data, store it in Data Cloud, and do much more with it.
However, if your requirements aren’t clearly defined or if there’s heavy customization involved, the implementation can get messy. So I wouldn’t recommend using Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud in cases where the requirements and structure aren’t clearly laid out.

Incentivized

• The donation software is very user friendly to add donations to.
• The report section is very easy to use and to run what you need.
• The contact portion is extremely user friendly and is easy to keep track of donors, what they've paid and communication to them.

Incentivized

• NPSP is designed to help with donor management.
• There are free add-ons for volunteer management.
• There is a new Program Management Module to better manage program participation and attendance.
• Campaigns help organize and report on marketing efforts though we use a third-party solution to send out marketing materials.

Incentivized

• In exporting reports, it would be helpful to have a "select all" option so you can easily select everything without having to manually click each one.
• In exporting reports, it may be helpful to have the option of saving various options for different needs so you don't have to manually click or unclick each choice every time, as you can currently only save one type.
• It would be helpful to be able to change an event/ticket information after it has already gone live for sales as we recently had an issue with this.

Incentivized

• Not an easy lift right out of the box unless you completely rule out customization
• Not "free to own" even if the grant is free because you'll need about 0.25 FTE to maintain it
• Constantly being updated which is cool but many items are "forced" and you must respond
• Lots and lots of customization are required to equal many canned solutions available for any one particular feature set (but none of them can cover the breadth and flexibility of SF)

Incentivized

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

There is really no other tool to compare and especially since Salesforce for Nonprofits is free!!

Incentivized

BGF is an easy-to-use platform for entering, editing, and analyzing customer or donor data and giving. I would highly recommend it to any organization looking to improve its customer relationship management functionality. As a previous user of different CRM platforms with other non-profits, BGF has made tracking donor information and communicating with donors much easier.

Incentivized

I think Salesforce has so much functionality that it makes it difficult in terms of overall usability. Once you can figure it out, it's a 10/10, it's just getting there. If you're willing to do the work to figure it out then you're golden. For what it's worth, I don't know if you're going to find something with this level of functionality that's easier to figure out

Incentivized

In 5+ years we have never had an issue with it not working when we needed it to. It is very reliable and doesn't seem to have a lot of bugs or interruptions in service.

Incentivized

It is always fast for us and reports have a very quick upload time. We don't integrate it into other programs so I'm not 100% sure about that, but it always works when we use it and is very reliable. Even when we run Excel files for complete information on donors, it always works very fast.

Incentivized

Most of the time they are quick and friendly and help me resolve any issues. There have only been a couple of times that we couldn't find a resolution and I was just told that NFG didn't have that capability.

Incentivized

I have never had bad conversations with any support people with Salesforce but we also have not used them very much. I put it a little less because we are struggling to switch to lightning (some of our custom features do not migrate well) and it feels like the help and support for a little organization is not incredibly helpful unless we want to spend a lot of money.

Incentivized

We only had one hiccup with the domain that was an issue on our end but NFG struggled to help us. It was finally resolved and we've been good ever since

Incentivized

I like Bonterra Guided Fundraising more than OneCause because OneCause was only used for events at the last nonprofit I worked at. Bonterra Guided Fundraising allow nonprofits like ours to have event pages, fundraising pages, and donor management software at a better cost than OneCause. Ultimately, I would always choose Bonterra Guided Fundraising!

Incentivized

As a cloud native organization with no previous Microsoft infrastructure, Salesforce was a more logical and effective option for us. The suite of products was also far more comprehensive and required less customization. We were able to adopt a "configure not code" approach to our development of systems to support our mission that lowered the cost of upgrades.

Incentivized

We are happy with all of the options

Incentivized

It works for the departments we need it in, finance, administration and fundraising and marketing. It does everything we need.

Incentivized

• We went from raising only 12k at our gala to needing to implement the auction software as we work to raise 75k at our next gala. We wouldn't be able to facilitate such a large event without our software.
• We're able to streamline a lot of tasks. Instead of using several interfaces, we're able to rely solely on Bonterra Guided Fundraising, which saves a lot of time.
• We're able to dream about expanding the ways we reach people. Instead of simply sending out emails or using Facebook, we can send out newsletters and promote events with their own website link, which is a huge step up.

Incentivized

• New email platform (integrated with Salesforce and based on Salesforce segmentation) increased open rate by 7%
• Using Salesforce Flows to design a custom batch process for approving small grants reduced days of work to one or two clicks.
• We replaced a paper system (walking around with a clipboard) to a virtual system (you can do it from anywhere!) for approving payments.

Incentivized