Neon CRM is a constituent management platform designed for nonprofits and membership associations. Its relationship-focused system offers a comprehensive view of supporters and members, enabling more engagement and revenue. It can be used to manage fundraising campaigns, events, communications, and it offers reporting tools to give stronger insights into the user's organization. It automates processes like email marketing, workflows, volunteer management, and payment processing so that users…
$99
per month
Raiser's Edge
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
N/A
N/A
Pricing
Neon CRM
Raiser's Edge
Editions & Modules
Essentials
$99
per month
Impact
$199
per month
Empower
$399
per month
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Neon CRM
Raiser's Edge
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
All plans include unlimited system users, unlimited records, unlimited online forms, and unlimited ticket support. Essentials is a streamlined version of Neon CRM designed for smaller nonprofits. Premium support options are included with Empower. All pricing is based on the organization's revenue.
Neon vs. The Raiser's Edge Raiser's Edge is the gold standard for fundraising-focused CRM applications. However, it is so complicated that there are higher ed courses and certificate programs you can take to learn it all. The printed manual is hundreds of pages long. You can do …
Salesforce and Raisers Edge are extremely expensive to set up to be functional. These are great options for very large organizations - colleges and hospitals. For a smaller operation, NeonCRM meets many needs for a much more affordable price.
NeonCRM and GiftWorks both severely limit reporting capabilities by mandating a foundational criteria. For example, your report must be based on a very broad category, such as donor or donation: if you select donor, you cannot see certain criteria attached to donation (last …
If you are looking for a quick and easy database option, which integrates breezily with email clients like MailChimp and Constant Contact, and has built-in credit/debit card processing capabilities, NeonCRM is a very good option. An affordable alternative to Salesforce or Raiser's Edge, it does lack some of their "bells and whistles" but gets the job done. On the one hand, Neon features a shallow learning curve and solid user interface, and is web based and mobile friendly. On the other hand, Neon might not be totally appropriate for large or national level organizations because some of the reporting seems less "robust" than pricier alternatives...
Raisers Edge is outstanding for storing and reporting on constituent data and communications. There are many options for creating methods of tracking by different information included and also for creating personalized tracking methods.
Raisers Edge is not very well suited for an organization that also has a gift shop and visitors center. Allowing membership admission and item sales is not practical.
NeonCRM allows you to build events, take registrations, and customize those events. Customizations include different ticketing options, add-ons, promotions, etc.
NeonCRM does a good job helping you track donors' activities/engagements.
It also provides a variety of reporting mechanisms - from dashboard snapshots to graphical reports - that allow you to review programs at a glance or in-depth.
Learning the ropes is largely accomplished by reading manuals and watching videos. I don't learn that way. I'd much prefer to be shown. I guess I'm old school.
They can be stingy with the customer support. We bought the big package and I still wind up going back to my salesperson to help me cut through any red tape to get what I need.
Data posting to Financial Edge (FE) is limited and complicated to understand (took us time to adjust). The posting report does not have enough info: Appeal, campaign and who posted to FE. In genereral, RE/FE integration is not explained by Blackbaud properly, we had to figure out everything on the go.
Volunteer module is a bit cumbersome; some fields have duplicate fields in the event module; the identical information ends up being recorded in two different places.
Neon CRM was difficult and frustrating to use without IT experience, and way to costly for the a small to mid-sized nonprofit. We believe that we lost donors due to the inaccurate report system in Neon CRM
There are many CRM tools on the market however Raisers Edge especially with NXT offers everything you need in one database. It’s a little pricey however Blackbaud support is super helpful and they offer so many tools and add ins.
The Neon CRM system is confusing (we had to watch video tutorials and html code to understand many of the features, many of which we did not need). Around 2022, Neon started to go downhill. Bells and whistles were added that were of no benefit (to our nonprofit) and the system became even harder to use
it does lots of things well (prospect tracking and event management), some things FANTASTIC (gift records and donations and relationships). It is rigid enough for the database administrator to maintain good clean data, but flexible enought for customization across organizations so specific data can be kept as needed for YOUR specific organization needs.
Since the software is expensive to use, only so many people are able to active users at once. There are times when I may have to wait or ask another user to log out so that I may log in.
As stated before, they push you to read the manual or watch the video when what I want is a human being to walk/talk me through it. Like I said, maybe I am old school but that's how I learn. It's been a challenge.
For most users, only chat support is available. There is a phone number, but it is very labor-intensive to get someone on the phone, and the chat does not include an easy way to screen share. Those sessions need to be scheduled in advance and almost begged for; the chat line always has a long wait time, and sometimes it seems their support personnel is chatting with more than one client at a time.
It's critically important to consider where you are taking your fundraising efforts and strategy, and to collaborate closely with other departments who will also use RE. I would strongly recommend that you investigate best practices -both from Blackbaud (theory) and with other organizations (practice) - to create a user manual and guide for RE within your organization
It works. It's easy to customize for nonprofit and industry-specific categories. It does what it does well, and integrates with platforms that specialize in those areas rather than trying to be everything to all users.
Salesforce has a more modern feel and I felt that it was easier to perform functions beyond the basics, such as running reports for analysis, on Salesforce. But The Raisers Edge already existed at my company and given that I only needed it for basic functions and did not need much training to do those, I decided to use The Raisers Edge.
It takes longer than necessary to do things so that makes it cost more staff time to complete the work we need. One example is with online gifts since you can't import these into a batch we have to manually add all of the online gifts which is time consuming.
