iMIS vs. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

iMIS Engagement Management System is well suited for associations or other non-profits that operate without a lot of bells and whistles. So far in my experience if you want to do more sophisticated operations, marketing in my specific role, then iMIS Engagement Management System may not be the best AMS. It does the basics well but the more high-powered you want to get then the more it's going to cost by having your vendor of choice to work to enhance or upgrade what you have.

Incentivized

If you only want to track donations, I'd go with something simpler. If you want to track donations and programs and connections between them, there may be nothing better. If you have no technical abilities and no budget, restricted yourself solely to what it does as described exactly in the manual. If you can't devote about 0.25FTE to the constant maintenance and upgrades, don't go with it.

Incentivized

• One-stop-shop. I love that we have one system that will track our income, manage membership, email contacts, manage our website and pull reports.
• Response time on support tickets. Whenever I have a problem using iMIS, I can either log into their support site to submit a help ticket or send it directly from my email account. Someone normally responds to me within the hour and then I will get a solution within the day no matter the time of day I submit the ticket.
• Easy to use widgets. I love using widgets to pull a page together. They have slideshow widgets that use on a daily basis. There are also forum widgets and widgets to pull an already created query to a page you choose to display this information on.

Incentivized

• NPSP is designed to help with donor management.
• There are free add-ons for volunteer management.
• There is a new Program Management Module to better manage program participation and attendance.
• Campaigns help organize and report on marketing efforts though we use a third-party solution to send out marketing materials.

Incentivized

• System Performance: iMIS has always seemed to have had performance issues....sluggish specifically. Though some of that may be in part to some of our customizations, but we don’t think so.
• Integrations with 3rd Party Products: we would like to see more integrations with 3rd party apps.

Incentivized

• Learning curve - very powerful, but takes time to learn
• Batch processing - takes time and advanced skills to reach efficiency for data entry and certain operations which you want to do in batch
• Mass email is extremely limited - must choose a third party tool which adds complexity and cost to the system

Incentivized

There is really no other tool to compare and especially since Salesforce for Nonprofits is free!!

Incentivized

I think Salesforce has so much functionality that it makes it difficult in terms of overall usability. Once you can figure it out, it's a 10/10, it's just getting there. If you're willing to do the work to figure it out then you're golden. For what it's worth, I don't know if you're going to find something with this level of functionality that's easier to figure out

Incentivized

I have never had bad conversations with any support people with Salesforce but we also have not used them very much. I put it a little less because we are struggling to switch to lightning (some of our custom features do not migrate well) and it feels like the help and support for a little organization is not incredibly helpful unless we want to spend a lot of money.

Incentivized

I think both are great tools. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. I really like the CMS component that comes with iMIS. It is important for an organization to be able to quickly build websites to engage their members. iMIS provides tools to do this out of the box.

Incentivized

As a cloud native organization with no previous Microsoft infrastructure, Salesforce was a more logical and effective option for us. The suite of products was also far more comprehensive and required less customization. We were able to adopt a "configure not code" approach to our development of systems to support our mission that lowered the cost of upgrades.

Incentivized

• iMIS had a neutral impact on my non-profit organization's overall business objectives. Both the finance and department teams just worked around the limitations that iMIS had.

Incentivized

• Salesforce has allowed us to easily track donor communications in one area, which I believe has improved our donor communication overall.
• Salesforce for Nonprofits has made it easier on my org to track and pull donation-related information and has reduced the amount of time we need to do these regular tasks.

Incentivized