Bloomerang - a great user friendly solution!
November 22, 2017
Bloomerang - a great user friendly solution!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Bloomerang
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.
Bloomerang is not as robust as Blackbaud's Raisers Edge, but it's also not as costly. I find Bloomerang much more user friendly to the novice, but again, it doesn't offer many of the things the full version of Raisers Edge does.
I used an old version of eTapestry that was a nightmare to navigate and train folks on. However that was a few years ago prior to Blackbaud purchasing them, so I don't know if that's changed. Same can be said for Kintera.
I used an old version of eTapestry that was a nightmare to navigate and train folks on. However that was a few years ago prior to Blackbaud purchasing them, so I don't know if that's changed. Same can be said for Kintera.