CharityEngine vs. Mobilize

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

Mobilize is very well suited to add processes around your non profit activities. Especially to host events and intimate your audience in real time about any new and upcoming events. It also automates the whole process to collect feedback from your audiences. Not so suitable to target new audience for your events.

• 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

• Event RSVP.
• Automated confirm emails/texts.
• Integration w/ NGP-VAN tools (EveryAction, Votebuilder).

Incentivized

• Doesn't help provide top of the funnel audience.
• Connecting like-minded people to mobilize crowd together for a common cause.
• The insights can be more actionable.

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

Before using Mobilize, we were handling confirmations using traditional organizing methods. By shifting to Mobilize, we freed up our organizers to focus on new volunteer recruitment and cut our flake rate significantly. We still use EveryAction from NGP-VAN, but we set up Mobilize to interface directly with that system via API.

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

• My audience is more aware of upcoming schedule.
• We get pin pointed feedback on our events.
• Reduced the TAT to schedule events.