Item: Bonterra EveryAction
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Bonterra EveryAction

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization is an NGO and uses the Bonterra EveryAction for most of its fundraising functions.
This includes:
a) creating a contact record for prospective and current donors
b) tracking individual donors and funds raised
c) tracking the effectiveness of email campaigns
d) managing grant prospecting and reporting
e) creating custom reports on funds raised, grants awarded, team to-dos (called follow-ups), etc.
f) Running analytics and generating visuals on grants, donors and funds raised g) creating and sending our monthly newsletter
h) hosting our donation page
i) importing information from our wealth screening software
There really is a wide scope of solutions that Bonterra EveryAction provides beyond what a traditional CRM can do.

Pros and Cons

Pros

One stop shop for creating newsletters, sending them out to mailing lists, and tracking analytics (including donations).
Grants management (we are able to track funds received, reports due, and all points of contact associated with a given donor organization).
Contact records (the new contact record feature makes it easy to find past donation history, demographic information, survey responses, communication preferences, etc. for a given contact. We are also able to import information from our donor prospect software into the contact record so everything is in one place).

Cons

User interface: The user interface seems a bit dated. The categories on the main page are not named in a way that makes it intuitive to find where to go for what you are trying to do. For example, the donation page information is under "online actions", email campaigns are under "targets emails", but to schedule send e-mails, that's under "automation". There's a lot of EveryAction-specific lingo to get used to.
Learning curve: Because Bonterra has so many functions, some of them are quite hidden, and some are complicated. We are very glad to have paid for premium customer support as there are features we could not have figured out ourselves. We have had to create our own instruction manual to onboard new members of the team when they join.
Search function: The search function is finicky. For example, I cannot search for a grant from the main search bar as that is only for contacts. You'd then think the easiest way to find a grant is to search for a donor and then pull up the grant through the contact record but grants in the contact record are not clickable. The only way to open up the grant from there is to click on the last financial contribution from the donor that corresponds to that grant and click "edit".

Return on Investment

We are able to make informed fundraising decisions. We can easily see what campaigns were successful so that we know where to invest our time. We expect to see improved fundraising performance.
Saving time on data collection: Having automated reports on donations and grant funds raised is a huge time saver. Rather than spending hours once a quarter pulling information out of a bulky Excel sheet, we can simply refresh the reports we've set up and visualize the data anytime.
Saved money on other softwares since Bonterra EveryAction is a one stop shop: We've been able to cancel the subscription to our email marketing company since we send all our campaigns through the software. We are also able to send surveys and to host our donation page.

Implementation Rating

Implementation was a very long process. The process of "bulk uploading" all of our donor, grant and contact information into the software was a very heavy lift for our team. Customer support during this period was helpful, however, we had to have multiple points of contacts from different departments to answer different types of questions. As I've mentioned, the learning curve has also been steep. We've been using the software around six months and still regularly contact customer support for help with some of the tool's functions.

Reliability and Availability

We've never had an issue with Bonterra EveryAction being unavailable. If there has been maintenance on the website, it has never been at a time that has inconvenienced us. We access the software multiple times a day and have not faced access issues. There are sometimes bugs but we have contacted support and received a response relatively quickly when we've spotted them.

Performance

Bonterra EveryAction has completely streamlined our fundraising processes. The fact that our contact records, email marketing, and grants management is consolidated into one software makes it much easier to make decisions on where we need to spend our time and which donor relationships are the most urgent to manage. I would also say that the performance of individual employees has improved as well. We are able to delegate responsibility on donor reports due or relationships to cultivate and schedule reminders or "follow-ups" accordingly.

Key Insights

Do you think Bonterra EveryAction delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Bonterra EveryAction's feature set?

Yes

Did Bonterra EveryAction live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Bonterra EveryAction go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Bonterra EveryAction again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Kindsight iWave, Constant Contact, Microsoft Teams

Likelihood to Recommend

Bonterra EveryAction is very well suited for the more "traditional NGO". My organization, for example, has many more grants than we have individuals who donate to us. However, Bonterra EveryAction truly excels on the individual fundraising side. It allows you to launch email campaigns, measure their success, track interactions with donors, and create contact records with fields for almost anything you'd want to manage about a donor. There are additional features that are not relevant to my organizations, but that I know could be an asset to others such as managing volunteers and phone banking. For us, these features just add to the bulk of the software, though. We really appreciate that we've been able to make many of Bonterra EveryAction's features work for grants management -- but it is definitely not the software's main function.
I would not recommend it for organizations that do not have much time to get to know the tool or are only planning on using one or two features.

Comments

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Great versatile CRM for NGOs with a wealth of functions