CharityEngine vs. Salsa Labs (discontinued)

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

Salsa Engage provides a robust interface to Salesforce--our primary CRM--allowing non-intervention synchronization to categorize supporters into groups for email communication. As we are only six months into our implementation, we have not found areas where it's not appropriate to use beyond nit-picky synchronization delays and smart group updates.

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

• Autoresponders and automated emails have been really cool and simple to use, that tool in itself has added a lot of value and has been a powerful way to keep supporters engaged.
• Donor management is one thing that Salsa CRM gets really technical with. There is so much information that you can have on each donor.
• I like the forms and how easy they are to embed on the website, like email sign up forms or donation forms. I can make them look seamless as they sit on the website and gather information and donations.

Incentivized

• When we started with Salsa, not every option was available online, some were desktop specific. As it has been some time since I worked with Salsa these have probably been resolved.
• The ability to communicate between Salsa CRM and other Salsa software options. Sometimes the crossover was not as efficient as was needed.
• Tagging and setting up rules for particular donors was somewhat confusing - meaning, therefore, that the amount of training needed to implement the software was somewhat intensive.

Incentivized

It suits all of our needs.

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

You do not have to be a tech-savvy person to be able to use the CRM. Reporting is easy to do.

Incentivized

Support response has been swift and knowledgable, though not always the answer I've wanted. One huge design flaw is if I add a new Salesforce field to sync, Salsa Engage will not sync it unless it has changed since the last sync, requiring me to fake an update for an entire database or re-sync the whole enchilada. Better to recognize it's a new Salesforce field and perform the sync en masse.

Incentivized

Salsa Engage is one of the easier products to set up and use, but with that comes limitations. If you want something simple, this works, but if you have more complex needs, then you'd be better off investing in another system that requires more set up work, but provides more customization and robust reporting opportunities.

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

• Has helped increase our donor retention as we are able to track all communications with donors ensuring that they remain connected.
• The improved emailing (with fewer bounce rate) has helped increase our website and donation page visibility.
• We've sold more tickets to our fundraising events with an improved event management system.

Incentivized