Designed for large, complex organizations as well as federated and international nonprofits.
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FrontStream Panorama
Score 3.0 out of 10
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FrontStream boasts over 20,000 nonprofits and socially-minded companies as users, to power their auctions, charity events, peer-to-peer and online fundraising, and employee giving. Panorama's interactive web interface helps nonprofits expand their donor base, manage event registration and donor communications. With prebuilt customized templates, users can create branded, personalized nonprofit page where they can tell a meaningful, personal story about their cause and create the…
It works well enough for fundraising purposes and donor tracking. I think it would be less appropriate for instances or industries where you don't need so many data points on someone. You are able to attach a lot of information to a record so if you don't need that info (simply need contact info for example) you might want a simpler system
I am sure that FrontStream Panorama is well suited to process online donations. It did do that for us. But, that is about all it did. None of this information was ever successfully implemented to be pushed to Salesforce, which led to me manually entering a year's worth of data for our online gifts. I would not recommend this platform if your organization uses Salesforce to manage donor data.
It is incredibly user-friendly! From the first time I opened a constituent profile, I could easily navigate between tabs and find the information I need in a timely fashion without confusion.
It allows personalization! Depending on what information is most relevant to me, I can organize the widgets that are shown first. I typically look at the same few pieces of information on every profile, so I don't have to dig for it!
To begin, the customer service at FrontStream Panorama is virtually nonexistent. After our implementation and connection to Salesforce we were having a lot of major issues. Unfortunately, it felt like our account manager and the general customer service at FrontStream Panorama did not care. It came to the point where our Chief of Development had to reach out to a higher executive in the company because 6 months into switching to their platform nothing was functional and no one was making any attempt to solve the problem.
That leads me to my next point in that the Salesforce connection does not work. They spent close to a year "trying" to figure out why none of our data was being pushed from FrontStream Panorama to Salesforce and they continuously blamed Salesforce despite them assuring us that there were no issues on their end and despite it working seamlessly with our new platform. I don't believe they have the capacity to support these issues.
For our Gala, we decided to use their Bidding for Good platform as an add-on to selling tickets for the event. Come the day of, the platform did not work. We were not able to sign in our guest electronically or collect their credit card information. Luckily I had paper copies of our guest list and table arrangements because if not it would have been a total disaster. It was so bad that we ended up getting a 100% refund.
Lastly, when we switched over to FrontStream Panorama one of the key selling points was how you could customize almost everything in your page. However, it is almost impossible to do so unless you have a great understanding of code. This was not mentioned at all and led to a lot of frustration on behalf of our small team.
We've covered a lot, but mostly because we are happy with the system overall. There are a few kinks, and sometimes it takes a minute to figure out the right wording to pull a report or the best way to code a new category that we want to track. But Blackbaud is always there to help us, and once things are figured out - they are super simple to replicate. It wouldn't be worth it to switch to a new system and lose of all our information and time put in to mastering the system
It is purely dependant on who you reach and speak to. You can call twice in an hour period and get two completely different answers. You can get people who are willing to help, people who just tell you no, or people who have no idea what to do. They need to work harder on training their support people. The chat function works very well for simple questions and is my preferred go-to when seeking help.
They do not seem to care about the problems of their customers. They do not return phone calls. They do not provide the updates on their support page that they promised. They have had two weeks to repair the basic functionality of their system and they have been unable to do so. This is a complete failure as far as I am concerned.
Most of our issues were self-inflicted and related to BB's work. We did not "staff up" correctly, our data to be converted was not in great shape and we set some unreasonable goals. With BBs help we were able to clean our data and prep it for conversion and we adjusted the goals to be more achievable with the timeline we were given. We found the BB staff to be responsive and focused, especially when working on-site with us.
When were doing our search, in 2016/2017 we identified three products that might have potential for our use. They were Ellucians Advance, BlackBaud e-CRM and Sales Force. We had 18 years experience with Ellucian, we had several Sales Force installations on campus and very little knowledge of e-CRM. We rejected Ellucian's Advance because at the time they were implementing a new sub-platform and the product was still being developed. Their anticipated completion date did not meet our campaign timeline. We rejected the sales force offerings because we did not have the time or resources to select different apps, tie them together so they shared data correctly and then deal with multiple vendors when there was an issue. BB e-CRM offered us an established, growing platform that was fully integrated internally. It had the capability's we needed and room to grow
