Item: CharityEngine
Rating: 4
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

CharityEngine is used by one department to manage all donations to the organization. It is used to generate data for management review and audits and as a communications tool.

Pros and Cons

Allows users to create unique queries to generate targeted data.
Allows the entry of addresses from all around the world, not just US addresses.

Forms for use on our website and in emails are extremely limited. 3rd party products are far better and have much more robust interfaces.
Commonly used features frequently break and have to be reported, because when updates are made, CharityEngine staff are not fully verifying their effectiveness.
Requests for assistance with chronic issues go unresolved for months.

Most Important Features

Collection of donor data.
Ability to query on MOST data fields.

Return on Investment

CharityEngine has allowed our organization to grow in the past few years, but it has not kept up with industry trends and avoids making changes and updates requested by users.
Our overall business objectives cannot be met with CharityEngine alone. We must export data and use other applications to generate the data we need.

Key Insights

Do you think CharityEngine delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with CharityEngine's feature set?

Did CharityEngine live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of CharityEngine go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy CharityEngine again?

CharityEngine has the POTENTIAL to be a good CRM, but both unresponsiveness to the more complex problems go unresolved for months at a time. Employee turnover is huge, which is likely because upper management is doing nothing to solve the internal problems. I would NOT recommend this CRM at this point.

While CharityEngine does allow reasonably robust storage and querying of data if you plan to send emails through your CRM, look elsewhere. CharityEngine's framework is clunky and counter-intuitive, in addition to frequently just not working at all.

Usability

There are a lot of frustrating things about the general usage of CharityEngine. It syncs with a nine-digit zip code database, but doesn't automatically populate exportable fields with this data - it must be manually requested for each record. Buttons that allow a user to quickly move to a specific area of the data in a customer record frequently stop working after updates; are found by users and reported, and then take a month or longer to be fixed. A clunky and counter-intuitive "creative" database frequently fails completely and is always slow.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Technical support not required Feel confident using	Not well integrated Inconsistent Slow to learn Cumbersome

CharityEngine might work for you, but beware their high employee turnover, and take promises with a grain of salt

Overall Satisfaction with CharityEngine