CharityEngine vs. Neon CRM

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

If you are looking for a quick and easy database option, which integrates breezily with email clients like MailChimp and Constant Contact, and has built-in credit/debit card processing capabilities, NeonCRM is a very good option. An affordable alternative to Salesforce or Raiser's Edge, it does lack some of their "bells and whistles" but gets the job done. On the one hand, Neon features a shallow learning curve and solid user interface, and is web based and mobile friendly. On the other hand, Neon might not be totally appropriate for large or national level organizations because some of the reporting seems less "robust" than pricier alternatives...

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

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• Very user friendly
• Great customer service--they always quickly reply to inquiries with great information for troubleshooting
• It is a great catchall for donor/grant information

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• Right now, there doesn't seem to be a way to assign reports and events to a staff person. In other words, if you want to receive emailed notifications when donations, payments, or event registrations come through, you have to receive ALL of them, not just those for particular events, etc.
• There is no intuitive way to take a deposit from a customer.
• NeonCRM doesn't allow you to create and bill with an invoice.

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.

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As stated before, they push you to read the manual or watch the video when what I want is a human being to walk/talk me through it. Like I said, maybe I am old school but that's how I learn. It's been a challenge.

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NeonCRM can grow with us. We were able to implement a few features initially and, as time went on, incorporate others. We continue to do that.

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• 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.

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• Huge positive ROI in that is has alleviated the need for hand-processing of membership transactions
• Huge positive ROI in that our reporting has been standardized

Incentivized