CharityEngine vs. Neon Fundraise

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

Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound) is well suited to third-party fundraising. We use it for our walk fundraiser, and we enjoy the level of interactivity and customization it offers our constituents. It also makes donation entry and reporting fairly easy, so it would be well suited for operations with vast numbers of donations in cash, check, and credit. It might be less suited to events with a handful of large donations from corporate benefactors.

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

• Rallybound is able to have websites that are user-friendly to our participants. Our participants are able to navigate through their profiles with ease. With our participants able to easily navigate their pages, the staff is able to spend less time asking questions and instead coach their fundraising efforts.
• Rallybound is able to customize your website to your needs, for a fee of course. Rallybound is also able to customize certain reports for you if that specific report has not already been created. This is essential for my team when pulling revenue numbers or projecting future revenue/budgets.
• Rallybound's customer service is quick to respond and helps navigate issues. This is crucial when you are on-site at an event trying to solve a problem.
• Rallybound allows you to check-in individuals based off of the registration on their website. Their check-in is so simple and easy to use.

Incentivized

• Communication around new features and updates could be better.
• Ticketed event pages could have more custom options.

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

I was not a part of the evaluation process when Rallybound was selected. Classy was one of our top three choices, however, when we decided to eventually go with Rallybound. I do know that my team continues to look for the best platform to use, and Classy is always discussed.

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

• Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound) has reduced the staff burden of data entry by making more available to secondary admins and users.
• Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound) has improved the quality of the analysis of data from our walks.
• We have been able to surpass our expectations for peer-to-peer fundraising in a year affected by the pandemic.

Incentivized