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Bloomerang is widely used across organizations to effectively track and manage various aspects of donor and constituent information, …
Starting at $79 per month
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What is Bloomerang?
Bloomerang is a cloud-based donor management platform that is designed to help nonprofit organizations to reach, engage and retain the advocates they depend on to achieve their vision for a better world.The vendor says their donor management application is rooted…
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Standard
$119
Cloud
per month
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://bloomerang.co/pricing-plans
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $79 per month
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What is Bloomerang?
Bloomerang is a cloud-based donor management platform that is designed to help nonprofit organizations to reach, engage and retain the advocates they depend on to achieve their vision for a better world.
The vendor says their donor management application is rooted in principles of philanthropy; simple to use and focused on empowering an organization’s team to achieve remarkable results through enhanced donor loyalty.
The vendor’s value proposition is that Bloomerang is designed to deliver maximum results, maximum utilization by the organization’s team and maximum flexibility with no need for additional technology spending on their part.
Additionally, the vendor says their solution, plugs in the latest technologies and delivers them with a clean, modern interface - thus giving organizations a cloud-based system that is their “go-to” for better fundraising.
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About Bloomerang
Bloomerang Integrations
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Bloomerang Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS |
| Supported Countries | United States |
| Supported Languages | English |
Frequently Asked Questions
Bloomerang starts at $79.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 10.
The most common users of Bloomerang are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
Bloomerang Customer Size Distribution
| Consumers | 0% |
|---|---|
| Small Businesses (1-50 employees) | 90% |
| Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees) | 5% |
| Enterprises (more than 500 employees) | 5% |
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(160)
Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
Bloomerang is widely used across organizations to effectively track and manage various aspects of donor and constituent information, communications, and fundraising efforts. With its user-friendly cloud-based system, users have the flexibility to access and manage their donor CRM system from anywhere. This ease of access allows for efficient tracking and management of individual donors, corporate, foundation, and government grants, event attendees, newsletter subscribers, website visitors, and more.
One of the key benefits of Bloomerang is its capability to streamline the development process. Users can easily enter gifts, create gift acknowledgments, manage donor interactions, and generate comprehensive reports. This platform offers tremendous functionality at a reasonable cost. It allows users to create and manage custom fields without requiring external support or consultants. This customization feature enables organizations to tailor the system to their specific needs.
Organizations rely on Bloomerang to address various challenges they face in donor management. The platform simplifies tasks such as segmenting donors, tracking donor retention rates, managing event attendance, and collecting online donations. It also provides robust reporting and communication features that help organizations identify weak spots in donor retention and track the results of direct mail campaigns. Overall, Bloomerang solves the problem of ease of use for multiple employees while providing simplicity, customization options, powerful reporting capabilities, and effective communication tools.
Intuitive and User-Friendly Interface: Users consistently praise Bloomerang for its intuitive and user-friendly interface, with many stating that it makes the software easy to navigate and perform tasks quickly. This sentiment is shared by a majority of reviewers, who appreciate the simplicity and efficiency that the interface provides.
Helpful Chat Support Function: The chat function in Bloomerang's support system receives high appreciation from users, as it allows for easy and immediate assistance. Several reviewers have mentioned how valuable it is to be able to connect with customer support through live chat, enabling them to resolve their queries or issues promptly.
Comprehensive Donor Relationship Tracking: Users highly value Bloomerang's donor relationship tracking feature, particularly the timeline view which offers a comprehensive overview of each constituent's interactions. Many users find this functionality extremely helpful in managing and nurturing their relationships with donors effectively.
Confusing User Interface: Some users have found the user interface of Bloomerang to be confusing, which has made it challenging for them to efficiently manage tasks. They have expressed difficulties in navigating the system and understanding how to perform certain actions.
Steep Learning Curve: Several reviewers mentioned that it took them a significant amount of time to learn how to use Bloomerang effectively. They had to rely on watching instructional videos and reading blog posts in order to grasp the functionalities of the software.
Limited Customization Options: Users desire more flexibility and customization options within Bloomerang. Specifically, they would like greater control over customizing online forms according to their specific needs. Additionally, they express a need for more automated report generation features that cater to different purposes and requirements.
Based on user reviews, users commonly recommend the following for Bloomerang:
Consider specific features and needs. Thoroughly evaluate the specific features and needs of your organization before choosing Bloomerang. Explore different donor databases to find the best fit for your individual needs and comfort levels with cloud-based CRM or donor databases.
Try it out and utilize support. Give Bloomerang a try and experience its ease of use. Take advantage of the strong support provided by reaching out to staff with any questions. Make use of the helpful resources available on the website.
Keep database organized and avoid duplicates. To keep costs down when using Bloomerang, it is advised to keep your database organized and avoid duplicates. Clean and accurate data is emphasized for effective use of the software.
Overall, users recommend Bloomerang for smaller nonprofits as it seems to be an ideal fit for their donor management needs. They highlight its ease of use, strong support, and cost-effectiveness. However, they also suggest considering specific requirements and thoroughly vetting information before switching to Bloomerang for an easier conversion process.
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Reviews
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February 28, 2020
A Pretty Good Fundraising and Crowdsourcing Resource
Bloomerang is used by a number of volunteers and contractors involved with fundraising, crowdsourcing, campaign generation, and donation/gift management. It is a one-stop shop for recordkeeping, contact management, analytics, and marketing, without an external need for using other standalone software, such as Excel spreadsheets (except for importing and exporting data, new contact groups, etc.).
- Household management for related or residence-sharing donors--plenty of fields for capturing data on individuals living under the same roof, with the ability to also link them to others by relationship (such as siblings, cousins, in-laws, co-workers, etc.)
- Funding analytics--first rattle out of the box when signing in. Thumbnails of how the organization is doing over short- and long-term spreads, most recent donors, etc.
- It's not as intuitive as I'd like it to be. Although most of the training videos make features look easy, I've had to search through menu items with some degree of frustration, but eventually found the workarounds needed.
- Creating a specialized marketing segment requires building a report based on filters. The reports can be saved and tweaked. But sometimes, you know, I'd just rather reverse the process and start with an importable list from the database so I can consider contacts with complex criteria, in advance of creating a segment.
November 07, 2019
Bloomerang or Bust
We use Bloomerang to track and manage individual donors; corporate, foundation, and government grants; event attendees; newsletter subscribers; website visitors; and more. While our program staff could use Bloomerang for a variety of other purposes, it is primarily a tool for our administrative team. It's allowed us to condense our mass emailing and donor data tracking into a single tool, and has generally streamlined our fundraising and communications processes.
- Reporting: Once I understood the logic behind Bloomerang's reporting tools, I could not believe I'd ever worked a different way. Some of our funders request very complicated reports and getting the relevant data out of Bloomerang is SO much easier than it was with our previous CRM tools.
- Website integration: I love the tracking functionality that Bloomerang offers, as well as how easy it is to integrate event ticket, volunteer, and other forms into our existing website.
- Intuitive design: I've introduced total novices to Bloomerang and been very impressed with how quickly they've been able to figure out all the top level navigation as well as deeper functionality.
- Mass updates: The top thing that Bloomerang currently lacks is the ability for users to execute their own mass updates. You can currently pay a relatively small fee for this type of work, but I do miss being able to update a huge group of accounts in one fell swoop on my own.
- Email layouts: I'd love to see a nicer interface and better WYSIWYG editor for creating emails. The existing set up is fine, but could be so much nicer.
- Dashboard: It would be nice to be able to customize the home screen dashboard a bit. I'd like to be able to choose a few different reports to see automatically, and to be able to hide other things that aren't as relevant.
March 08, 2019
Bloomerang is a pretty good tool to have
My organization currently uses Bloomerang to track all donations and donors, as well as being the backend to receive donations via our website. It’s also useful for tracking any correspondence with donors. It's being used primarily by our Development department, but also our Finance department has access obviously to track incoming donations. Bloomerang solves efficiency problems by keeping everything in one place as it tracks all things related to donors, and because it's online based, our staff have access to information from anywhere.
- Easy to set up campaigns and to receive online donations for specific campaigns.
- Report running is easy and comprehensive.
- Sets apart donors who are very active and need special attention.
- Currently, only one person's contact information can be used for online giving pages they host, so if you have multiple events or campaigns that are not handled by the same person, this gets confusing. We ended up making a generic email address that is a distribution list to each person.
- They use Sendgrid for the mass mailing. Over the timeframe we have been with them, Sendgrid has had different "glitches" that Bloomerang had to have us use workarounds for.
November 28, 2017
Why I chose Bloomerang for our CRM
We use Bloomerang for tracking donors, donations, volunteers, event registration and online giving. Bloomerang is our core client relationship management system.
- Bloomerang is very intuitive and user-friendly, even for staff and volunteers that are not technologically oriented or experienced.
- Bloomerang is built on the concept that donor retention is key with a dashboard that shows donor's love (on fire to cold) for each constituent, making for a very quick survey of current relationship status.
- Bloomerang has a fabulous tech and user support staff making it easy to reach out with questions. We have never had to wait for someone from Bloomerang support to chat online!
- Bloomerang incorporates online giving and event registration seamlessly.
- Bloomerang can export to QuickBooks easily.
- Event registration could be improved by adding the ability to select more than one item in a transaction. This would allow for a single transaction to include multiple types of registrations and/or sponsorships.
- Adding the capacity to "undo" a data import would reduce anxiety around adding data en mass.
- Additional standard reports would be helpful for those without deep experience with donor database usage.
November 22, 2017
Bloomerang - a great user friendly solution!
Bloomerang is being used by our fiscal department and our Development department to keep track of contacts and donations. In the past donors were kept in various Excel files which was not very conducive to tracking their giving history or managing duplicate records. We were looking for a software that would address this issue, while at the same time be very easy to train someone on the basics of using it, which Bloomerang is.
- New contact entries are a snap. It literally takes about 2 minutes to train someone on how to enter a new contact into the system.
- Entering donations is also a very easy process and super easy to train someone on how to do it.
- The dashboard is useful and gives a nice rundown of current donations.
- Processing credit cards within the system is also very easy, however we still use Paypal for non-profits to process donations that come in over the phone due to the cheaper rate.
- The process of entering new tributes (In Memory of/In Honor of) could be much more streamlined.
- As with most of these donor management softwares that I've used, the Thank You letters could be more functional. I usually export the information that I need into an Excel file and do a mail merge with a Word doc.
- The event module has been useless for us. I've tried to set it up a couple times so people could buy tickets to events, but it's not super-flexible or user friendly.
- It's frustrating that if you're going to use it for your online giving form, you have to have a description next to each amount. For example: "$25 - This will buy meals for a local senior for a week" or something to that effect. You can't make a form with just the dollar amounts. Therefore we're using QGiv as our online donation form.
June 19, 2017
Bloomerang is a good...but mixed...bag.
We use it as our main fundraising database. We started essentially from scratch, and now have about 3,000 records. This is the second nonprofit in which I've launched Bloomerang.
- The reporting interface is very clean and intuitive. By the far the best and easiest I've used.
- The engagement index is helpful, along with the donor retention meter. Just as constant reminders.
- The overall record interface is clean, easy to read and easy on the eyes.
- The email builder is very limited. More and more users are going outside Bloomerang to build emails, and that's not particularly helpful since there's the tie to the donor record is then lost.
- Until recently, the inability to edit letters created in batches was a BIG miss. Took WAY too long to start fixing that one.
June 16, 2017
Bloomerang is the CRM love of my life
We use Bloomerang to record our donors and volunteers. It is used by our CEO and members of our fund development department. It allows us to track donations, volunteer hours, and any interactions we have with donors and volunteers such as email correspondence, meetings, or solicitations.
- The reports are comprehensive, very customizable, yet easy to use and read.
- Bloomerang allows you to assess which people are most loyal to your organization and those that require more stewardship.
- The staff at Bloomerang encourage input and suggestions for improvement, and there is a process in place to address all customer concerns and to make system improvements to continually improve the system.
- Constituent profiles resemble a Facebook timeline, making it easy to see highlights at a glance without having to analyze a spreadsheet.
- The system tracks your donor retention. Currently it does not track giving by household, but this is something the Bloomerang team is working to change.
- You cannot set triggers for emails to go out on specific dates, like on a constituent's birthday. However they have plans for this to happen in the future and recently rolled out the ability to schedule mass emails.
- When you create what you believe to be a new constituent profile, you are not alerted if you are possibly creating a duplicate entry. They do have help forums and webinars, however, on how to clean up duplicates in the database.
June 07, 2017
Bloomerang - a good idea with some growing pains
The organization I am working with is a small school with a very small administrative staff preparing for a capital campaign. They were using a very outdated database to store constituent information. We chose Bloomerang because we were under the impression that it interfaced with Firespring, the new website software we selected. The intended purpose is to streamline the development process: entering gifts, gift acknowledgment, donor interaction and reporting.
- The Dashboard is a nice feature for getting an overview when you log on.
- The Summary feature which shows a snapshot of the status of a constituent is also a plus.
- The workshops informative and online training support is also helpful.
- I think the thing I find most frustrating is that you can't do batch posting of gifts. For example, if you have 30 sponsors for your 5K run or I have a list of 150 people who attended an event and just want to post a note to their record, you must post each individually rather than being able to predetermine the parameters which are shared by all. After contacting support to find a solution, I was told that I would have to build an import which would have very strict parameters that would have to be vetted by the Bloomerang team. While I am glad that they are there to help, it is a very time consuming process and we purchased Bloomerang to make these tasks less complicated and time consuming.
- Working with the letter templates is really cumbersome. Bloomerang assumes you are printing letters onto printed letterhead. While there are some fairly primitive tools for formatting, you cannot control the margins and end-up doing a lot of time consuming adjusting so that a letter looks right.
- The report generator is very confusing. For example, if you set a parameter to exclude soft credits, the report still contains soft credits. You cannot edit the report within Bloomerang, you must export to Excel. As a result, when you do want to run a batch of thank you letters, you end up with letters you don't want, formatting you don't want and no way to edit the letters since they are generated and downloaded as one long document.
- When we purchased Bloomerang and Firespring (website), we were under the distinct impression from the marketing by both entities that their collaboration produced integration between the database and the website. For example, if a constituent makes a donation or registers for an event through the website, we could be able to have it track as an interaction on the database. Apparently that is not the case and getting that info into the data is complicated, awkward and time-consuming.
June 07, 2017
Bloomerang works!
I am in charge of our donor data base. We use it for tracking events, online donations, and reports. I have been very happy with results and customer service. This company has changed they way we do business.
- User-friendly, this system is very easy to use and if you don't understand something there is a ton of resources to help you.
- Support & customer service are immediate!! No need to wait more than an hour.
- Constantly having online classes to improve skills.
- Better reporting ability with filters. Many are confusing to get the results you want. I would love a feature that says "show me ...... ".
- Sending thank you letters right from a transaction entry (specifically a manual entry).
- Better ability to run a year-end tax report for all donors.
June 06, 2017
Newly Bloomed
We are using bloomerang throughout the entire organization. We use the system as a one stop shop database for all of our alumni, donors and potential donors. It addresses the issue of having a place to house all of our constituent information to assist us with profiling.
- Bloomerang provides the ability to collect unlimited amounts of constituent information.
- Having one location that houses a place for emails, letters and newsletters.
- The dashboard is a great component.
- The event registration integration, could have an option for a no fee registration.
- Addition of adding an event to your calendar.
- Limitations on design of email and newsletters.
We purchased Bloomerang nearly one year ago. I use Bloomerang as well as my donor development coordinator. The fundraising software that was being used prior to me joining the organization was difficult to use and did not provide us with the features needed to capture donor information and manage our newsletters and other communications.
- Bloomerang was very easy to customize. We were able to create constituent types that are unique to us.
- Bloomerang's customer service is exceptional. The purchase and installation was smooth and easy to navigate. Whether using the chat feature, email or phone support, our questions have been answered quickly and completely.
- Bloomerang's email feature is one of my favorites. We can easily create professional and interesting emails about events, for stewardship and even newsletters. One the email is sent, we can view instant results including open rate, who clicked on links in the email and if the email bounced.
- We use the online event registration feature. We would like the donor to be able to add the organization name to the registration.
- We would like to be able to print envelopes for letters directly from Bloomerang.
June 06, 2017
Bloomerang Review
We currently use Bloomerang for the development department. We use it as a donor database, as a way to send emails, for sending letters to donors and funders, website integration, and more.
- Bloomerang allows you to integrate giving forms onto your website in a seamless manner.
- Bloomerang's email integration makes it really easy to segment audiences.
- Acknowledgement letters are easy to create and edit.
- Not being able to schedule emails in advance really makes the email function a drawback. Other software, like constant contact and MailChimp, have this function and I still have to use those services for the December emails when I am not in the office.
- Bloomerang does not let you use the event registration function for free events.
- The number of constituents allowed in the database without additional fees is limiting.
We use Bloomerang across our organization, a PreK-8th grade independent school, to record our fundraising and development activities. It helps us track donations, communicate with donors, measure donor engagement and steward and acknowledge our donors. Bloomerang gives us the ability to easily access donor profiles and track the results of our fundraising campaigns.
- Provides tracking for fundraising campaigns
- Measures donor engagement
- Allows for easy acknowledgment of donations
- Letter templates can be a bit quirky when it comes to spacing on the page
- Would love an integrated survey feature
- Basic event management features would be helpful
June 05, 2017
Great product
We use Bloomerang to disseminate information about multiple events, activities trainings and fundraisers using newsletters, email blasts and creating flyers. We also use it to create our thank you letters.
- Create thank you letters
- Disseminate information to multiple emails
- Log fundraising income
June 05, 2017
Bloomerang Boosts Bottom Line
We use Bloomerang for prospect and donor information, gift processing, entering contact reports, and producing monthly reports.
- Being cloud-based, Bloomerang is accessible anywhere and anytime. This convenience is simply priceless. I don't have to be In the office at a particular time to enter or retrieve the information or report that I need.
- Bloomerang is intuitive. It's a system that requires very little prior knowledge in the field of fundraising to be used effectively and efficiently.
- People of all experience and expertise level can use it. Novice and seasoned advanced professionals alike can get the most out of it.
- The support is always there when you need it and you can customize certain features according to your organization's needs.
- Bloomerang could incorporate the total event management features.
We use Bloomerang as the donor management system for our small non-profit of nearly 2000 records. It is used across the whole organization and is used to manage our relationship with donors and potential donors. We also use it as a type of CRM system to manage our relationship with our volunteers and "friends" of our organization. We use it to track volunteer interactions, store documents and for communications.
- Bloomerang is great for reporting. It has a strong reporting interface and you can filter and query on any field or combination of fields. You can also create custom fields that are just as easy to report on.
- The general user interface (GUI) of Boomerang is easy to use and very clean - lots of white space. This makes data entry and working with the system very easy.
- The timeline interface is a great feature of Bloomerang - its an easy way to see at an individual level the history of various interactions a constituent has had with your organization. Did they make a donation, did they attend an event, have they visited your website, did they open the email you sent them, etc.
- The online chat support is phenomenal! Just superb!
- While it is great that Bloomerang offers email integration, it currently has a more limited inventory of email templates and features than some of the "free" email standalone platforms.
- Additionally, another great integration feature it has is letters. There is some challenge in doing "one-off" letters and having them be apart of the timeline for a constituent. There are some workarounds we have created.
- The more complicated integration features - like online donations and event registration - are great but the user experience the "canned" functionality generates is a little weak.
June 02, 2017
Happy with Bloomerang Ease of Use
Bloomerang is used by all members of our nonprofit team. We use it for all donor database systems from donation entry, acknowledgments, and reporting and tracking to fundraising event participation. It is so super simple to use that all members of our team train and get updated training with the online scheduled webinars to accessing the library of cataloged webinars. I also use the past webinars as refreshers or for more in-depth learning.
- Our staff can immediately send donation acknowledgement letters super efficiently while also preparing donation deposit forms uploading addresses, etc.
- I can continue to build reports and to add categories when a board member has asked to have a specific event or type of funding tracked.
- Volunteers are easier to track with skill sets and calendaring availability and documents pertaining to each volunteer is saved in one place so all team members may access them as needed.
- Personalizing individual acknowledgement letters is a real need when I am using a template for a donation but also want to add a side note.
- Wish I could personalize one or two separate letters out of an entire batch when all don't need to be personalized.
- Wish I could reorganize the new person/organization entry fields so I don't have to scroll down through all the fields to get to the ones that I use most frequently. I'd move fields around so I could put the more frequently used fields at the top of the entry and the more obtuse fields towards the bottom so I could scroll down only when I need to... Would make new entries go a lot faster.
May 26, 2017
Bloomerang Works for Me!
It is our donor software for the entire organization. It addresses the capture of donor data and event sponsorship/registration while providing donor communication tools (letters and emails) and reports regarding donor retention, et. al. and dashboards to manage individual fundraising campaigns. We also use the credit card feature (Stripe partnership with Bloomerang) for easy payment processing.
- Very intuitive system to use--functionality is a strength. Customer support through ongoing webinars about different functions of the software have been particularly helpful.
- Like the letter writing template that checks for use of reader-level language that will make our appeals more effective.
- Like the drag and drop donor/event registration email communication templates that are easy to use. We were able to boost attendance and revenue at a recent fundraising event because of a strategy that made use of the email communication feature.
- Still getting the hang of the reporting function, but much easier to use than our former software. Like the link to Donor Search but haven't used it a lot yet.
- May be a missing piece of knowledge on my side, but printing mailing labels has been a challenge to have all the fields where I want them to be. I seem to have to enter all of my basic data into the "individuals" tab instead of "organizations" to make this work (even if I would like the data to be in "organizations").
- Publishing emails/event registration to our website has a bit of a challenge--it's not an intuitive process. But Bloomerang customer support was able to assist our IT technician to help provide a solution.
- It's my first year using the system and I am still learning about many aspects. The custom conversion from our former system had a number of bugs in it that I am still weeding out--that has been time consuming.
May 26, 2017
Bloomerang works!
We use this to manage information on our volunteers and donors. Letters and emails can easily be automated and run through this system.
- It keeps your Donor Retention front and center
- Its design is very intuitive
- It makes running reports simple
- It would be good if you could better restrict access to donor information from assigned users.
Bloomerang is used as the donor database system that tracks giving and donor communication and cultivation.
- Bloomerang's desktop page that provides snapshots of campaigns is very easy to understand and intuitive. I like how the layout and icons are easy to adopt. Overall, the system is easy to use because of the layout/design.
- It's very important that donor relationships are cultivated and maintained. Bloomerang allows us to do this more efficiently through the Timeline, letters and soft credits. All these factors allow us to build a better profile of the donor.
- Access to the site on a mobile device is well done. There is little lag and it works just like the desktop instead of re-learning a mobile version.
- As a small nonprofit, we can't afford to have a separate wealth search engine, but the Donor Search within Bloomerang made it accessible to us.
- The reporting is very malleable. It allows us to customize a report by every way imaginable.
- I love the desktop snapshot feature, but the campaigns on their can't be customized to reflect only donations or pledge payments, versus donations and pledges. I wish their was a greater ability to customize the desktop.
- I cannot connect PayPal to Bloomerang so I have to input things individually. I do have Stripe but there are some things on the website like event tickets that aren't connected to Stripe.
- We do peer-to-peer fundraising. We currently put the person fundraising as the donor with a pledge. But, they receive donations from other people and we can't find a way to credit that pledge from someone else donation. Peer-to-peer fundraising isn't new and there should be a way to do this within Bloomerang.
- The letters are great, but I wish instead of a PDF it would export it as a Word or GoogleDoc making it easier to adjust text after running.
- Event management - We need to not only be able to register people for events and process their payment, but we need to be able to track event expenses and like letters, create unique tickets for events.
May 23, 2017
Feedback From Our First Year with Bloomerang
We use Bloomerang to track individual donors and volunteers. It is exclusively used by me, the fundraising manager and overseen by the executive vice president and the CEO. Before Bloomerang we were tracking donations in a financial system. This is the first time we are able to see the longevity of the donations and the amount of engagement we have with our donor base.
- Track engagement
- Show totals of what is raised
- It's very user-friendly
- I think the forms can be a lot more advanced. In the system it would be helpful if each form could go to different people in the organization and not just the person who is in charge of the account. I am currently forwarding forms to my bosses externally but I need to send revenue reports very consistently to people who are fundraising on our behalf. It would be helpful for them to receive them as well.
- It would also be great if the "transaction items" could be isolated to specific forms and not automatically updated to everyone's profile.
- The automated messages with forms should give out more information. For example if someone is donating to our Color Run it would be helpful to see on the email more than the donation they made like how they answered the other questions.
- It should be possible to create a free event with that form and add an optional donation. Awareness events are very important.
May 23, 2017
Bloomerang Can Be Your Fundraising Best Friend
I use Bloomerang as my fundraising/donor CRM system. I am a one-person shop and needed something easy, efficient and able to do a variety of tasks without requiring high cost or intense support. It is a cloud-based solution to give me more flexibility on where I access my info as well as providing off-site information back-up that I lacked before. Besides tracking my donor data, I also use it for online donations that provide me with donation form flexibility as well as automatically propagating donation data into the database. I also use the event registration and e-mail subscription variants on these forms. If I was deriving the majority of my revenue from events, this might not be the right platform. But, it provides me with tremendous capability, reasonable cost, and the ability to create and manage custom fields without needing to pay for consultants or support. I used to use Raiser's Edge, but adding the capabilities I get with Bloomerang would have tripled my expense. Bloomerang has been very supportive and responsive so far.
- Custom fields: you can easily tailor it to your exact circumstances rather than using one field for a different piece of information because it doesn't fit anywhere else.
- Intuitive cloud based application that is easy to navigate: very quick learning curve, no need for expensive consultants or support agreements.
- Transition and support: smaller organization that genuinely cares about its customers.
- Designed for fundraising: has several tools that focus on donor retention which is a key goal of all fundraisers.
- User restrictions: they currently don't allow different access levels. I can't let my board members in as "look only" users or restrict information access. they are currently working on this, but right now it's "all or nothing."
- It doesn't have a dedicated events module.
May 23, 2017
New to Bloomerang and Loving every moment!
Our Assistance Ministry uses bloomerang to track donor relationships and manage event attendance and online giving forms. We use it as a database and to manage volunteers. All our online giving forms are made in bloomerang as well. Its most helpful for keeping track of our donations that come in and generating thank you letters for these donors.
- Quick Thank You letter generation - We get the letters out the same day that the donations come in.
- We can generate reports on any aspect of donor information collected - for example, donors who donated last year and also attended a specific fundraiser.
- Bloomerang is very intuitive - clear and easy to use and learn. I love the live webinars that help me learn more about the features it can do.
- I would love to see a way to select multiple users at once and add info about them all at once - batch editing.
- Reports that are a combination of transaction and interaction, instead of one or the other.
- I would love to customize the online forms more.
Bloomerang is used primarily in our fund development and finance departments. We use Bloomerang to track donors, potential donors, and donations; to manage our e-newsletter communications; and to collect donations online. We also use Bloomerang to report on fundraising and communications strategies throughout the year and to balance the books with our finance department.
- Bloomerang has greatly improved our online giving platform. It integrates seemlessly with Stripe for credit card processing, and forms look great embedded on our site. We use Bloomerang for general online donations as well as online registration for events.
- Bloomerang email communications are good looking and easily branded. Bloomerang also makes it easy to track our open rates and click rates for each email we send.
- Bloomerang makes it easy for us to track our communications with individual donors by providing a way to note interactions of different types as well as make personal notes in a donor's record.
- Bloomerang's timeline feature makes it very easy to look in a donor's reocrd and understand their history with our organization in a matter of seconds.
- The reporting function in Bloomerang can be somewhat difficult to use. The reports are run by constituent, interaction, or transaction, which makes it hard to pull information across modules into one report. Bloomerang's improvements to reporting have been huge over the last year, but there's still a ways to go to make it a little more intuitive and user-friendly.
- The relationship feature in Bloomerang is somewhat clunky. You can see relationships for an individual donor, but you can't pull reports by relationships. It also takes a long time to set up households and leaves room for inconsistent data entry if more than one person controls the database.
- Customer service around added services (such as Prospect View) is slow and unresponsive. Bloomerang should develop partnerships with effective and professional donor prospecting and donor research companies to help nonprofit clients.
We use Bloomerang as our only fundraising database. All donors and donation information is entered every day. Weekly we send thank you letters that are easily generated through the Bloomerang system. We also use the database information to reconcile with our daily bank deposits and that makes our end of the month accounting go very smoothly. We often refer to the donor information when we are looking for sponsors for different events in areas around the state.
- Because Bloomerang is so easy to use, initially entering donor information and adding to a donor account leaves little room for errors to be made. Instead of having software with no flexibility and one donor with several accounts, we have one donor with one account. We are confident in the data we retrieve instead of "hoping" it is accurate.
- We have the ability to tabulate YTD donations for a donor along with the donation just made.
- Even I can use it!
- Excellent! Excellent! Customer service.
- We would like the flexibility of adding graphics to the bottom of the donation letter.