Bonterra Development + Digital enables nonprofits to increase efficiency, optimize supporter and prospect interactions, and raise more money by providing expansive fundraising, digital, and organizing tools on a unified CRM.
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ExpressionEngine
Score 10.0 out of 10
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ExpressionEngine is a content management system from EllisLab in 2002, a successor to pMachine Pro, a blogging system, which is written in object-oriented PHP and uses MySQL for data storage. ExpressionEngine is their flagship Content Delivery Platform.
$299
One Time Fee
Pricing
Bonterra Development + Digital
ExpressionEngine
Editions & Modules
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License
$299.00
One Time Fee
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bonterra Development + Digital
ExpressionEngine
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
Contact team@info.bonterratech.com for more information about pricing.
I have used the Bonterra Development + Digital tool at 4 different organizations since 2016. I think Bonterra Development + Digital is an excellent tool for smaller non-profit organizations as well as those organizations that have not used a CRM in the past. Its functionality, ease of use, and excellent customer support make it an excellent tool for small non-profit organizations. Once an organization has more than 5,000 donors/prospects the tool becomes less effective primarily because of the inability to track contacts, integrate with desktop email systems such as Outlook.
ExpressionEngine is a very powerful and flexible content management system. It can handle a simple small business website all the way to a large corporation's website. If you are a business with multiple websites ExpresionEngine can handle that as well with it's Multiple Site Manager. I think ExpressionEngine would be less appropriate for a global large scale business with a magnitude of sites with different regions and languages.
Some people find the Create A List tool more intuitive than other record-querying equivalents, which can make it easier for digital organizers to target and segment bulk emails, broadcast texts, door-knocking sheets, etc.
The ability to add custom fields on both Contact and Contribution records allows for some flexibility in making the system adapt to your organizing model
There aren't a lot of other tools out there that make phone banking quite as accessible
EveryAction's Email Series/Automations allow for some pretty sophisticated things to run mostly on their own, from welcome and reactivation series, to drip campaigns
For the most technical EveryAction users, the ability to customize online form appearance and functionality using callback functions allows for pretty intricate customization of submitter experiences (e.g. redirecting form submitters to different destinations based on how they filled out the form)
Content structuring. You can set up channels and fields to hold just about any kind of information imaginable; text, images, videos, numbers, code, etc. You can structure this information any way you want and in any order. You literally create your own information database just the way you want it using a clear, easy online interface.
Template system. Utter freedom. Need I say more?
Exensible. There are a lot of add-ons, extensions, and other external modules that extend the core functionality of ExpressionEngine. Need a user management system? Check out the User module at http://solspace.com.
Event Summaries & Contributions - I wish we could add more than one contribution to an event at a time; this ends up taking hours to apply for donations.
Volunteer Activity and Scheduling - there is currently not a robust Volunteer section to schedule and track.
Faith Tracking - a space for churches, pastors, etc. would be great so we don't have to use Custom Contact Fields.
Planned Giving - needs a tab in the 'View All Details" view, currently only in 'View Contact Record" mode.
Primary Contact - needs multiple options with labels. We have many contacts at the same place and Relationships don't always have the right option.
For me, one of the greatest strengths of ExpressionEngine is also one of their weaknesses. There are so many add-ons available (some free, some not) for ExpressionEngine to allow you to do just about anything you want. However, the more add-ons that you use the more you have to deal with when performing updates. For instance, is the add-on compatible with the new version of ExpressionEngine - or even another add-on? What if that add-on gets abandoned by the developer - is there another that can perform the same functionality?
I think that ExpressionEngine needs to offer more out of the box than it does. Yes, you can get add-ons for just about anything but this adds to the cost. I have a list of add-ons that I use on almost every site which can raise the cost of getting started with a new site by $100-300. So add that to the cost of a license and you're at $400-600 and you haven't even started working on it yet. For instance, I shouldn't have to buy an add-on to allow me to customize the menu for my end-users.
The membership management feature is seriously lacking. Fortunately, there are add-ons (for an additional cost) to allow you to manage things better.
We will never us EA, nor recommend them to another org, simply based on their failed promises to deliver training, on-boarding and then charging our account during our free 3 month period, then after cancelling the contract their legal department tried to force us to sign a cancellation agreement that barred us from writing reviews, making comments, etc!
I'm satisfied with the way that my site runs on EE. My primary concern is that support is now a profit center for EE's publisher and so they've consequently gutted their community support boards. However, a good EE community is developing at StackExchange. At this stage, I don't think that EE is a good choice for an individual site owner. WordPress or SquareSpace would be a better choice unless you have a budget for support.
It's just so easy--there isn't a lot of techy lingo or graphics, so a regular person can log in and have a sense of what does what. There might be a few terms you need to learn, but everything is in common English so you can almost always find what you're looking for.
ExpressionEngine is very powerful and flexible. With this flexibility comes a bit of a learning curve. There are some great online resources for getting up to speed with EE, but the control panel can be a bit daunting. A lot of EE's installation process involves settings, configurations and flipping of switches. It is tedious, but well worth it as you ultimately have a very robust, secure and scalable CMS. Also, as of version 2.9.2, the control panel isn't responsive natively. You'll want to have a big enough screen to see the full control panel UI. Personally, I think the control panel would benefit from a major overhaul. It would be nice to see the colors and UI controls "modernized" and be able to more effectively customize the layout. Yes, some of this is built-in, and there are third-party add-ons to help, but maybe we'll see more refinement in future versions.
On the whole, EveryAction has been very responsive. When we have had errors, they usually respond within a few days, and there have not been outages that I can recall. When they need to take the system down for maintenance, they always give plenty of notice
The admin section would slow to a crawl the larger the tag section grew. There were many areas where better pagination would've helped improve performance. Nothing complicated, which made the lag so frustrating
I feel like product support and training should go hand in hand. Having to pay $5k to learn how to use a database is absolutely ridiculous and should be offered with the cost of your database, as it is with every other database I've ever used in the last 10 years of my career. With that being said, once I took the training, I found that the support was much more available. Having training and support behind a paywall is bad business in my opinion
I have personally never found any complications when trying to receive support from EllisLab in regards to ExpressionEngine when using the support plans they offer. I have always been responded to promptly and received satisfactory help with whatever my needs were in an extremely timely manner. This makes rating the support offered an easy job for me
They went through all the features and explained in easy-to-digest details what features the system had. They were also responsive to questions we had. We were able to check in with the support team after training and received prompt followups that helped supplement the training after we had real-world experience using the system.
I expected more. We made the decision not to transfer data from my old system into EveryAction, starting fresh and new. But when we have sought assistance, it is rarely given. We are most often directed to the training videos. That component I will add, is very frustrating and upsetting.
After installing the system a few times, you can see a pattern of things that have to be done to work the way you want them (settings, paths, etc.). By knowing what you want, you can put together some scripts that prepare the file system for installation, adjust post installation configuration settings, and install initial templates.
EveryAction is just more accessible and intuitive to navigate. It is straightforward, easily embedded on our site, and easy for our new team members to familiarize themselves with the platform. Especially for the advocacy and form-building features, EveryAction has been the best tool our team has used thus far. We enjoy using EveryAction and will likely continue to do so.
ExpressionEngine is vastly more flexible than any other content management system I have used to date and the quality of the add-ons are significantly higher than what you find in other directories. The ExpressionEngine community is also very willing and helpful with if you have any questions or run into any issues.
Maybe it's scale-able from the content user perspective, but it was very limited from the programmers perspective. So many custom hacks were necessary that it reached a point it would be impossible to upgrade to a newer version
It has saved me time because I can create events and connect Zoom directly and immediately save new contacts to my database from the registration.
In targeted emails, we have been able to collect small dollars through low effort fundraising asks.
Negative impact is many of our staff is not able to use it yet due to difficulty of navigation so they are going through user guides and tutorials and training to figure it out.
Being able to be recognized as a leader within the ExpressionEngine development community has led to us being sought out by those customers seeking expert guidance.
We tend to specialize in using ExpressionEngine for our customers, so it has been easier to ramp new resources up on our development process, as well as be able to seek out independent experts to use as sub contractors or freelancers.
As we have been using ExpressionEngine almost exclusively for a number of years, we have built a reusable repository of proprietary code that makes our development process much more efficient and decreases the effort required for our projects.
