DonorPerfect : Best fit and reasonable cost for that 1 million dollar non-profit.
Updated November 25, 2015

DonorPerfect : Best fit and reasonable cost for that 1 million dollar non-profit.

Richard House | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with DonorPerfect

DonorPerfect is currently our donor management database. We store all of our donor information as well as financial support.
  • Donor information database.
  • Financial information management.
  • Reporting.
  • Donor cash batch input. This is a very tedious and manpower intensive task that could be easily resolved. Most of the faith based competitors as well as Quickbooks have what is called a memorized gift. DonorPerfect does not have it nor will they provide one. They continue to ignore the many requests for improvement.
  • DonorPerfect provides a reliable, functional and versatile out of the box application. That is all any organization can ask for.
Donor.com - antiquated and unreliable. DonorPerfect has recently moved all operations to a more reliable hosted environment. And they release new versions of their software quarterly.
Salesforce.com - really strong Fortune 500 org that gives their software to non-profits. The cost to modify, improve and support the application far exceeds their generous donation. DonorPerfect has almost all the functionality needed for our org out of the box. Included in the relatively low cost of ownership is a support team that can fix most basic functionality and train in small cases.
Denari - weak support and very few updates. It does have a more superior cash batch input.
I believe DonorPerfect is well suited for 1 to 10 million revenue organizations. They have a fairly decent credit card processing system. It is not suited for strictly cash based organizations.

Using DonorPerfect

10 - Financial, donor management, CMS intergration and donor development.
4 - Minimal. I was able to design and implement the business processes within Donorperfects functionality. Training was completed with each person in a mater of a few hours.
  • Credit card processing. They have a very nice recurring credit card processing interface complete with very useful reports.
  • Cash batch processing. DonorPerfect does provide a nice basic batch process however it doesn't support a very good recurring cash batch process. I was able to develop a usable system however it is very time consuming and labor intensive. I have given them some very good alternatives and practices that competitors use but they are very comfortable in ignoring mine and many other very thoughtful suggestions in this area.
  • Report: they have a very good basic report system. The more expensive has been released but not ready for prime time in my opinion.
  • it's hard for me to imagine. DonorPerfect for the most part provides a very quality product in the non-profit space.
DonorPerfect is the best solution for our needs.

Evaluating DonorPerfect and Competitors

Yes - Denari: this product has a very poor support team. They can help you but their turnaround time is not efficient for our organization. The web interface is what really killed them. I've been in IT for nearly 30 years and needed all that experience to create a recurring donation. There is no way to determine how much partnership and revenue we have lost due to this very poor interface. DonorPerfect has a two alternatives to help in this area. DonorPages which works well for many organizations and DonorShops which is an excellent partner and choice for anybody that uses product based or sponsor based donations.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Analyst Reports
The web interface and support: as stated earlier DonorShops is an excellent partner for our needs. Their platform is actually a fully customizable CMS. However if you're like us you can use it to seamlessly integrate right into your existing CMS.
I wouldn't change a thing.

DonorPerfect Implementation

DonorPerfect provides an extremely easy to use importing tool and the support team was awesome. You don't have to do it in house; for a reasonable fee you can get it done by them.
Yes - security for credit cards is a manual process, because of PCI compliance we phased cash donors and new web donors first. Then after many phone calls were able to migrate credit and ACH donors. This is part of the process and unavoidable.
Change management was minimal
  • None this was the best implementation that this organization has had.

DonorPerfect Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
I was able to utilize the support team to train me in areas where I could not figure out how to use the application.
Very thoughtful, thorough and informative.
The product is very intuitive and for anybody with a image capturing software like Snagit you can easy write and train your team.

Configuring DonorPerfect

DonorPefect fits our needs very well.
No they have a good overall interface to support most of our needs.
Some - we have done small customizations to the interface - very easy to change fields displayed and how they respond to use.
No - we have not done any custom code

DonorPerfect Support

The support team is excellent. But once it goes to development that is when almost all issues go into a black hole.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
Not kept informed
No - basic support is good for now.
Yes - the only resolve bugs in releases. But I've had a few that were not resolved in a timely or satisfactory way.
During my migration period this support team not only answered but even developed solutions to aid me in my goals.

Using DonorPerfect

Poor cash batch interface. Almost half of our receipts are generated by cash and this interface does not support our needs very well.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
None
  • Credit card. Great interface and very informative reports
  • Reporting- to use for someone with fairly strong SQL knowledge. They have a very nice way to set filters and share the same report displaying different data based on the filter.
  • Donor management - very robust and customizable.
  • Cash batch input. The templates are tricky and sometimes even disables the functionality. This is random and when it is fixed most of the time it is fixed with no explanation as to how! The interface is very cumbersome and counter intuitive. Repeated suggestions die on the vine. I even talked to the 5 top executives at the last conference and feel no more confident that they really care or will even investigate my request.
Yes - It's new. This will require some time to mature. It does have a really nice CC interface with a swipe device.

DonorPerfect Reliability

[There have been] only two outages since we have started using it and they were extremely information proactive. This should scale easily based on your internet connection.
It's always up when we need it. There are some errors that happen and are not reproducible and cannot be resolved. But [they are] very few and none that cause disruption for the organization.
DonorPerfect is as reliable as your internet connection. It is a cloud based application and therefore you cannot pinpoint where the bottleneck is should you have one. But for the most part the app runs quickly.

Integrating DonorPerfect

It just worked.
  • DonorShops
  • Constant Contact
DonorShops and Constant Contact were a requirement, and integrate seamlessly and perfectly.
  • None
All of my vendors (aka partners) seem to happy with their integration partnership.
  • File import/export
Stay with as much out of the box functionality as possible. As an organization we do not support what I refer to as "shadow IT groups". This is people that want to build applications that are not connected to store data in a single database. Most just want to be programmers or programmers that were hired for the wrong reasons. They will always create conflict within the business.

Relationship with SofterWare

They provided me with a usable demo application. They gave me the ability to make a wise decision. BTW they are a Partner NOT a vendor. They are as much a part of our team as I am.
They are not very willing to help me with our outstanding challenge. Which is cash batch input.
They have a very flat cash outlay for the product.
Be flexible. You might not be able to understand all of your needs until you implement.

Upgrading DonorPerfect

Yes - seamless
  • So far bug fixes and credit card processing.
  • There are always visible ways to see what they are working on but timing it is never communicated. DEV will release when they do.
No - It fit our needs.
No - it fits our needs.