Bloomerang - a good idea with some growing pains
June 07, 2017
Bloomerang - a good idea with some growing pains
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Bloomerang
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 They were using a very outdated database to store constituent information.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.
Bloomerang was more affordable and the hype about what it is supposed to be able to do was something we perceived to be an asset. To be fair, because we are a small office trying to accomplish many goals with respect to marketing, communications and fundraising, there has been very little time to learn the product. Hopefully by focusing on learning to use the product more effectively, working with Bloomerang will become less frustrating and more efficient.