Raklet Community & Membership Management Software vs. Salsa Labs (discontinued)

Raklet Membership Management Software is most suitable for membership-based organizations like ourselves. If you want to create different membership plans and restrict some of the content for your paid members, Raklet can definitely be helpful. Also, our members were never this engaged before we decided on the solution. The membership management is off the hook; we can see all the activities of our members, and we don't need to manually correct their information, as they are able to update themselves. But if you want to sell physical goods to your members, you would need to use another marketing base besides Raklet Membership Management Software. We were able to go through, as we restricted some pages only to our paid members.

Salsa Engage provides a robust interface to Salesforce--our primary CRM--allowing non-intervention synchronization to categorize supporters into groups for email communication. As we are only six months into our implementation, we have not found areas where it's not appropriate to use beyond nit-picky synchronization delays and smart group updates.

Incentivized

• Membership management
• Great customer service
• Value for money is off the chain
• All the necessary features are included

• Autoresponders and automated emails have been really cool and simple to use, that tool in itself has added a lot of value and has been a powerful way to keep supporters engaged.
• Donor management is one thing that Salsa CRM gets really technical with. There is so much information that you can have on each donor.
• I like the forms and how easy they are to embed on the website, like email sign up forms or donation forms. I can make them look seamless as they sit on the website and gather information and donations.

Incentivized

• An online store would be nice
• Separate section for newsletter subscriptions
• More payment getaway options

• When we started with Salsa, not every option was available online, some were desktop specific. As it has been some time since I worked with Salsa these have probably been resolved.
• The ability to communicate between Salsa CRM and other Salsa software options. Sometimes the crossover was not as efficient as was needed.
• Tagging and setting up rules for particular donors was somewhat confusing - meaning, therefore, that the amount of training needed to implement the software was somewhat intensive.

Incentivized

It suits all of our needs.

Incentivized

You do not have to be a tech-savvy person to be able to use the CRM. Reporting is easy to do.

Incentivized

Support response has been swift and knowledgable, though not always the answer I've wanted. One huge design flaw is if I add a new Salesforce field to sync, Salsa Engage will not sync it unless it has changed since the last sync, requiring me to fake an update for an entire database or re-sync the whole enchilada. Better to recognize it's a new Salesforce field and perform the sync en masse.

Incentivized

We also evaluated those products before moving on with Raklet Membership Management Software. I would say the main problem is that these products are well-pronounced among membership management softwares. For this reason, first, their interfaces looked outdated and boring, and we would like to have a better landing page to promote our readers to visit our website. Secondly, they are not as flexible as we like them to be. Most of the other solutions offered one-for-all; we didn't feel like using them because we wanted something special and customized.

Salsa Engage is one of the easier products to set up and use, but with that comes limitations. If you want something simple, this works, but if you have more complex needs, then you'd be better off investing in another system that requires more set up work, but provides more customization and robust reporting opportunities.

Incentivized

• Increased efficiency
• Affordable CRM solution
• Promote people to subscribe at our pages

• Has helped increase our donor retention as we are able to track all communications with donors ensuring that they remain connected.
• The improved emailing (with fewer bounce rate) has helped increase our website and donation page visibility.
• We've sold more tickets to our fundraising events with an improved event management system.

Incentivized