FrontStream boasts over 20,000 nonprofits and socially-minded companies as users, to power their auctions, charity events, peer-to-peer and online fundraising, and employee giving. Panorama's interactive web interface helps nonprofits expand their donor base, manage event registration and donor communications. With prebuilt customized templates, users can create branded, personalized nonprofit page where they can tell a meaningful, personal story about their cause and create the…
$900
per year
iWave
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
iWave offers their nonprofit fundraising intelligence platform, for performing prospect research online with VeriGift, the company's donor and donation database.
Given the experience I have had this year, I couldn't recommend any part of their service. The product doesn't function as advertised and they don't communicate with customers to let them know what they are doing to fix it. It is a level of service that is completely unacceptable on every level.
iWave is well suite for gathering a better idea of who you should focus on for major giving efforts. While it gives you a lot of good information, some of that information feels not very important and therefore, clogs up the data you actually need. iWave should not be used for something like direct mail list making. iWave seems to really be focused on the major donor aspect and it is not a tool to be used to help with regular annual giving
FrontStream Panorama allows you to customize a larger portion of your pages that you design if you have experience with HTML and coding.
FrontStream Panorama allows you to integrate their other platforms, such as bidding for good, which is for auction items, and connect those to their ticket registration software.
FrontStream Panorama allows you to pull reports and customize and save reports you might use often.
The 360search allows you to do a comprehensive search across the multiple data sources at the same time.
You can stay organized during your research with the user-friendly and customizable Profiles and Labels.
The PROscreen ranking system allows you to get a quick snapshot of the alignment of a particular donor with your mission in an easy to read format that can be exported for another colleague with little extra explanation needed.
It's honestly tough to say what needs to be improved on a platform that I am a big fan of. The only time I am ever frustrated has more to do with the fact that some individuals are very adept at masking their charitable activities from public databases, and given that iWave can only show you what is publicly documented information I wouldn't consider that a liability of the product... rather it's a challenge of the field.
Some areas of improvement could include more online filtering and searching of Foundation grant histories. My current workaround is to download the entire grant history as a CSV (another good feature of iWave), and use Excel to sort and filter my results.
They do not seem to care about the problems of their customers. They do not return phone calls. They do not provide the updates on their support page that they promised. They have had two weeks to repair the basic functionality of their system and they have been unable to do so. This is a complete failure as far as I am concerned.
iWave customer support is more responsive than most software platforms I currently use. My requests are always handled promptly, and support is incredibly responsive, friendly, and patient. Plus, I can always get someone on the phone immediately if I need a problem resolved right then and there. In addition to the live and personal support, the iWave knowledge base is frequently update with new content, including video webinars that help you become a more powerful user of the software.
We switched from Classy.org to FrontStream Panorama and then back to Classy.org. But, originally what intrigued us about FrontStream Panorama was the ability to customize our fundraising pages. Visual design is so important to storytelling and to raising revenue and it seemed like a real opportunity for us to create beautiful campaigns that raised more money. They were also slightly less expensive than competitors.
iWave is affordable, offers current data, and is continually adding new data sources. They are the only product that offers international prospect information, which is helpful as our institution borders Canada. I was impressed when our sale representative went out of his way to teach me about how I could screen Canadian prospects in a way that helped us calculate an estimated real estate value for our prospects. We had no other way of getting this information as Canada does not provide the information publicly like tax assessor offices do in the United States.
We have consistently been able to increase our annual donations year over year since using iWave. There was an 11% increase just between our last fiscal year and the previous fiscal year.
Time spent on researching donors has decreased since all of the information needed is on one website rather than searching all over the internet for the information needed.
