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An okay product, good for some use cases, just didn't fit our needs.
December 15, 2014

An okay product, good for some use cases, just didn't fit our needs.

Dave Gladson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud NetCommunity

We used Net Community up until 9 months ago, when we switched to another product. We were using it to host our website, manage our donor database, and sending our donor emails for the whole organization. Basically, we used NetCommunity to communicate with our donors and manage our external web presence.
  • NetCommunity had a good API which interfaced with a piece of custom software our organization had built to manage our internal operations. This was highly convenient and we have not found another product that interfaces this well.
  • The product is solid, it may not be particularly user friendly but it does what it is supposed to do.
  • The support team at Blackbaud was reasonably supportive whenever we called in with issues we were having with the product.
  • We found NetCommunity to be unwieldy to work with. We needed to keep a full-time web developer on staff in order to maintain and update our ministry website. With our new product we are able to function without a full-time developer.
  • We found the reporting functions to be counter-intuitive, difficult to work with compared to other products
  • Some simple tasks, like keeping our email database up to date and cleansed of hard bounces and spam reports, were very manual and required much more time to implement than with other products.
  • Just neutral. NetCommunity has some great features, it just wasn't a good fit for our organization. Switching away from NC has led our team to spend more time on some tasks, less time on others. The difference is more in our focus
  • We've been able to increase our average email open rate from 9-10% to about 15% since switching away from Net Community. Much of the difference is our email strategy, not the software itself, but NetCommunity made it difficult for us to implement the strategies which we now use.
We switched away from NetCommunity 9 months ago to begin using HubSpot. NetCommunity isn't a bad product, but it just didn't perform the way we needed it to.
We've already switched away from NetCommunity and have no intention to switch back.
I think it all comes down to what approach your team prefers to take with fundraising. For some organizations, where you are using a more traditional fundraising approach, I could see NetCommunity being a good fit. But for us, because we use a less traditional, more marketing approach, it just wasn't a good fit.