Salsa CRM

Because Salsa Engage was part of the suite.

We chose Salsa CRM prior to Bloomerang coming into existence. We chose Salsa CRM over the two products (eTapestry wasn't part of Blackbaud at the time) due to costs, ease of use, and fitting into the needs we had within our own agency. We are happy with our choice and aren't second guessing it.

Classy is about the same cost per month. Classy was really good at peer-to-peer and crowdfunding. Salsa encompasses many more facets of a nonprofit. With Classy, we also had to have an email company and manage our supporters in a different program. Now, we do all three of those things together.

Although Mailchimp is pretty straight forward and nice to use, I prefer the email capabilities of Salsa. I think this is because Mailchimp didn't have direct access to all the donor information and we had to use Zapier to communicate between our donor information and Mailchimp. Now, Salsa has some clever tools that allow you to both automate and manually send out emails.

It boiled down to Bloomerang and Salsa CRM. The only winning factor that Bloomerang had over Salsa was that it was cheaper, as in free, but would only for a short period of time as we have increased our donor base. Salsa CRM is actually very cost effective for our nonprofit.

I have reviewed Salsa Engage and perhaps after our transition has taken place it might be a viable option versus using Constant Contact for internal and external correspondence.

We switched from DonorPerfect to Salsa CRM. Salsa CRM was much more dynamic and better suited for a non-profit. DonorPerfect seemed a little dated and needed a bit of an overhaul in order to meet our specific needs. In the end, when we couldn't get all the capabilities we were looking for unless we spent more money, we looked for another option that was more of a one-package includes all the services we needed.

We used to use several platforms for all of our needs and we found that it was nearly impossible to maintain accurate records that way, the inconsistency was inevitable. Salsa has really helped us solve that issue by creating a system (with a reasonable price tag) that talks to one another. For example, a ticket sale online will go directly into a record! The majority of our tracking was in Google Drive initially.

Salsa CRM is more flexible than Abila Fundraising 50. It is cloud based so that unlike locally installed Abila Fundraising 50 you can use it at the events and all donations at events are automatically entered. With Abila Fundraising 50 there was a clunky interface with Sage Payments and all the donations from the event had to be manually entered into the Fundraising 50 Database after the event. It took a lot of time and required more installations of fundraising 50 as development staff found other staff members to enter the information for them. I have limited Blackbaud CRM but from the little interaction with the product I can say that the Email campaign module of the Blackbaud CRM is extremely frustrating to use. Blackbaud CRM support was poor. I needed to add SPF DNS records for the Blackbaud email campaign and it took several attempts to get it working. The staff we spoke with barely understood how to what SPF records were and I had to find out and correct errors in what they told us to get it working. Also the email module crashes forcing the campaign author to start all over again.