Blackbaud NetCommunity vs. Bloomerang CRM

For those using the events module, NetCommunity is great, though if you do a lot of walk/run type of events where individuals sponsor other individuals, something like TeamRaiser might make more sense. If you don't have the staff resources for web developers dedicated to fundraising tasks, then NetCommunity is a great tool. It's not as customisable as an experienced programmer/developer might want, but it still has a lot of options. It also has a lot of nuance, and if you cannot make an investment of time or money into getting staff trained, it's not going to work out well.

Incentivized

I can't speak to Bloomerang's functionality for a very large organization, but for a small-to-midsize non-profit, I don't know what else you'd need! Need to register volunteers, or sell tickets, or generate e- or print communications, or pull donor data? Bloomerang does it. Bloomerang is my third CRM tool in my current organization and it is vastly superior in almost every way to the others that came before.

Incentivized

• Email marketing efforts are more targeted and now have a higher response rate. This equates to increased fundraising dollars.
• A/B split testing has allowed us to further tailor content that is preferred by our audience. This targeting allows us to be more successful in gaining conversions, event registrations, etc.

Incentivized

• Website integration for online donations is awesome! It makes it so much easier to raise money online. We've tripled the amount of money we raise online, mainly because of this and the ability to send emails through the system.
• Emails are tracked directly in a donor's record, so we can see instantly their engagement with our content.
• Integration with DonorSearch is awesome and seems to be improving often.
• They listen to their customers' needs. If enough customers request a feature, they'll get it for us. We feel like the development of this software is always happening and it's a partnership, rather than a transaction.

Incentivized

• NetCommunity has very simple analytics. It would be great to be able to see more in depth information on how constituents are reacting to the email they receive.
• Though it is simple to construct an email, making a complex design can be challenging due to the limitations of the design tool.
• Although A/B testing is available within NetCommunity, it is not easy to set up.

Incentivized

• Some of the searches did not bring up the expected results. It would be good to see the logic be a little more "fuzzy".
• More pre-set reports would be helpful for small organizations who do not understand the logic behind how to get the results they are seeking.
• An ability to just page through donor records would be nice. Sometimes you just want to browse the data to get inspired.

Incentivized

The only reason for this is due to the fact that we are only using the product for a specific purpose that is not directly tied to the newsletters. There are better products out there for what we are doing with grant processing. We will most likely move to a new software instead of renewing for our purposes

Incentivized

#1 - I am very happy with the product and support so far.
#2 - With significant data migration costs, I wouldn't even consider another option for at least 3 years no matter how much better it might be.

Incentivized

The interface with Raiser's Edge and the many different ways our users can interact with the website are a big plus for us. Event registrations are our most popular transaction type and having this on line makes our lives much easier.

Incentivized

Data and settings are very customizable to fit the needs of our organization. We are able to not only keep track of donations, but also other interactions we may have with a constituent. Support is extremely helpful when issues arise.

Incentivized

Product is stable is up 99.99% of the time. As a hosted customer, we do experience some minor downtime when routers or switches malfunction. We feel the downtime has been minimal and the communications around these outages has been good.

Blackbaud NetCommunity uses .NET technology. It can be sluggish at times if not optimized, but overall we have been pleased with the performance when handling large volumes of traffic.

Blackbaud NetCommunity and all of the Blackbaud products have a great support system. Blackbaud NetCommunity offers support through phone calls, chats, online, and email. Their response time is very quick and the support analysts work with you to resolve issues in a very timely matter. If they do not personally know the answer they will direct you to another support analyst that will be able to assist in a resolution.

Incentivized

Any time i had a problem or question it has been easy to find an answer or tutorial. When I cannot find an answer, it is easy to email or live chat with support and they resolve my problems very quickly.

As expected. Courseware was a nice reference guide.

I truly wish that "0" was an option. I never really pin-pointed whether the implementation issues that we had were caused by Blackbaud, or if it was part of a larger issue that began in-house.

Incentivized

We started out with Blackbaud NetCommunity but eventually switched to Blackbaud's Online Express. Online Express offered more features and was included with the upgrade to Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge NXT. Blackbaud NetCommunity did meet most of our needs and was a great starting point for our e-communications and online forms within our website.

Incentivized

Salesforce is infinitely customizable, but Bloomerang is pretty straightforward and works out of the box. It is simple enough that folks who are not familiar with the robust features of something like Salesforce can hit the ground running. Even as it is simple it is powerful as far as showing visuals that can help fundraising staff more clearly understand where the organization is and what donors they can next target for upcoming campaigns.

Incentivized

• We are able to manage quick turn-around when needed for Event pages and registration.
• Integration with Raiser's Edge is certainly efficient
• I believe the unsubscribe functionality is potentially removing folks permanently from all of our communications for one small reason, thus eliminating future fundraising opportunities because they cannot be selective.

Incentivized

• Because my organization has been using Bloomerang for only one year, we haven't yet studied what impact it has had on our ROI. We have, however, noted that we are able to more efficiently and more rapidly communicate with constituents now than we were able to before we had Bloomerang. We can quickly and efficiently generate acknowledgements and tax receipts - and do so - better than we ever did before.

Incentivized