Use Cases and Deployment Scope
When we signed up with Neon in 2018, it seemed to be the answer to our prayers. A donor database and email “blast” whatever all in one. As a nonprofit using Mailchimp to send emails and another donor program to maintain our database, it saved our nonprofit about $100 a month. Although the system was thoroughly confusing (you have to watch video tutorials and html code to understand many of the features), the customer support was good. 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 more confusing to use. For example, a donor’s email was not automatically added to our email list when the donor made a contribution. Instead, we had to check each donation that came in to determine whether it was a new or existing donor. If it was a new donor, we had to copy their email address and manually add it into our email blast list. This was an enormous time-waster for our org for something that should have been fully automated from the start. Other issues are listed below:
. Pricing continued to increase while the service continued to go downhill. We were paying almost $400 monthly when we cancelled. While doing so, Neon stated that they are designed to “help nonprofits” and could decrease our cost to $270 monthly and they were also adding 10 new technicians to help with the increased customer issues they were having. We declined.
· When we cancelled, Neon stated that “according to our contract” we would owe them for three months (totaling almost $1,200), even though we would not be using their system. This is not stated anywhere in the contract.
· Neon CRM refused to transfer our recurring donor information over to Stripe unless we paid them $450.
· Customer support was impossible to reach, often taking a week to 10 days to respond.
· Exporting reports was cumbersome, confusing and more importantly, not accurate. For instance, our export of “lapsed” donors included over a dozen of contributors who had donated within the previous week, and our export of “New Donors” included people who had donated only one time seven years prior.
· Email address uploads could not be trusted. When we uploaded new email addresses into our email blast list, the number of emails in our mailing list never increased. We are positive the addresses were new emails and not a previous emails that was overwritten. This includes new emails that numbered into the hundreds.
In our opinion, Neon CRM is 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.
Alternatives Considered
Mailchimp, DonorPerfect, Kindful and a Bloomerang product
