Neon Fundraise vs. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound) is well suited to third-party fundraising. We use it for our walk fundraiser, and we enjoy the level of interactivity and customization it offers our constituents. It also makes donation entry and reporting fairly easy, so it would be well suited for operations with vast numbers of donations in cash, check, and credit. It might be less suited to events with a handful of large donations from corporate benefactors.

Incentivized

I’d say it’s very well suited for organizations looking to move toward AI integrations and make more data-driven decisions. As I mentioned, I’ve also used the competing product from Blackbaud, which is a very closed system — you can’t really pull out the data. Salesforce, on the other hand, has a big advantage with its APIs, allowing you to extract data, store it in Data Cloud, and do much more with it.
However, if your requirements aren’t clearly defined or if there’s heavy customization involved, the implementation can get messy. So I wouldn’t recommend using Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud in cases where the requirements and structure aren’t clearly laid out.

Incentivized

• Rallybound is able to have websites that are user-friendly to our participants. Our participants are able to navigate through their profiles with ease. With our participants able to easily navigate their pages, the staff is able to spend less time asking questions and instead coach their fundraising efforts.
• Rallybound is able to customize your website to your needs, for a fee of course. Rallybound is also able to customize certain reports for you if that specific report has not already been created. This is essential for my team when pulling revenue numbers or projecting future revenue/budgets.
• Rallybound's customer service is quick to respond and helps navigate issues. This is crucial when you are on-site at an event trying to solve a problem.
• Rallybound allows you to check-in individuals based off of the registration on their website. Their check-in is so simple and easy to use.

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

• Communication around new features and updates could be better.
• Ticketed event pages could have more custom options.

Incentivized

• Not an easy lift right out of the box unless you completely rule out customization
• Not "free to own" even if the grant is free because you'll need about 0.25 FTE to maintain it
• Constantly being updated which is cool but many items are "forced" and you must respond
• Lots and lots of customization are required to equal many canned solutions available for any one particular feature set (but none of them can cover the breadth and flexibility of SF)

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 was not a part of the evaluation process when Rallybound was selected. Classy was one of our top three choices, however, when we decided to eventually go with Rallybound. I do know that my team continues to look for the best platform to use, and Classy is always discussed.

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

• Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound) has reduced the staff burden of data entry by making more available to secondary admins and users.
• Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound) has improved the quality of the analysis of data from our walks.
• We have been able to surpass our expectations for peer-to-peer fundraising in a year affected by the pandemic.

Incentivized

• New email platform (integrated with Salesforce and based on Salesforce segmentation) increased open rate by 7%
• Using Salesforce Flows to design a custom batch process for approving small grants reduced days of work to one or two clicks.
• We replaced a paper system (walking around with a clipboard) to a virtual system (you can do it from anywhere!) for approving payments.

Incentivized