CharityEngine vs. Little Green Light

CharityEngine has the POTENTIAL to be a good CRM, but both unresponsiveness to the more complex problems go unresolved for months at a time. Employee turnover is huge, which is likely because upper management is doing nothing to solve the internal problems. I would NOT recommend this CRM at this point. While CharityEngine does allow reasonably robust storage and querying of data if you plan to send emails through your CRM, look elsewhere. CharityEngine's framework is clunky and counter-intuitive, in addition to frequently just not working at all.

Incentivized

I LOVE Little Green Light! I was part of my old org's transition to this database, then I consulted a nonprofit and supported their transition to Little Green Light. Then, I started with my current org 2 years ago and moved us over. It's by far the best donor database I've used.

Incentivized

• Allows users to create unique queries to generate targeted data.
• Allows the entry of addresses from all around the world, not just US addresses.

Incentivized

• Donor touch tracking (calls, meetings, etc.)
• Relationships and stewardship
• Forms for event and other registrations
• Financial reporting and gift tracking
• Great support team! I was initially worried because they don't have a contact number, but they reply to support questions really quickly and are always helpful.

Incentivized

• I wish it had email formatting rather than integrating with MailChimp, but a small price to pay since it does in fact handle email communications. I've actually found that donors appreciate the "personal" touch versus the more polished, formatted email of MailChimp because they feel like the email went just to them.
• Wish it had the ability to email year-end statements as easy as it is to print them.

Incentivized

We have had no issues with LIttle Green Light so I do not see us moving to another software platform at this time. We are all familiar with how to use it and we are a small and mighty team so we don't want to rock the boat too much. LOL

Incentivized

There are a lot of frustrating things about the general usage of CharityEngine. It syncs with a nine-digit zip code database, but doesn't automatically populate exportable fields with this data - it must be manually requested for each record. Buttons that allow a user to quickly move to a specific area of the data in a customer record frequently stop working after updates; are found by users and reported, and then take a month or longer to be fixed. A clunky and counter-intuitive "creative" database frequently fails completely and is always slow.

Incentivized

Pretty easy to manage

Incentivized

LGL support is absolutely unreal. Send a question straight from inside the software and within minutes you will receive a response from someone at the company who will help you. Most of the time, the person responding to my questions is one of the developers or owners of the company. They are kind, patient, and very helpful. The online knowledge base is very comprehensive as well.

Incentivized

Little Green Light blows these other two CRM's out of the water. {Little Green Light has] ease of use, user-friendly prompts, and more pertinent information is captured. Little Green Light is perfect for my small-sized Non-Profit organization.

Incentivized

• CharityEngine has allowed our organization to grow in the past few years, but it has not kept up with industry trends and avoids making changes and updates requested by users.
• Our overall business objectives cannot be met with CharityEngine alone. We must export data and use other applications to generate the data we need.

Incentivized

• In two years of using it, we went from $200,000 annually in donor revenue to $500,000. Many factors went into that, but the ease of communications through LGL is definitely one of them.
• We went from managing communications with ~200 donors to ~400.

Incentivized