Bonterra Network for Good offers a nonprofit fundraising suite of applications, with donor management features like intelligent tracking of donor readiness and targeted messaging.
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CharityEngine
Score 4.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
CharityEngine is designed to simplify the complex world of online fundraising for nonprofits, as a nonprofit CRM. Integrated tools for donations, emails, and other elements of fundraising feed data into a central view to make it easier to know and care for donors. The solution boasts secure, payment-ready forms to give users complete control of donors' information.
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Pricing
Bonterra Network for Good
CharityEngine
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$350-$700
per month
Professional
$700-$1,500
per month
Enterprise
Call for Customized Pricing
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bonterra Network for Good
CharityEngine
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
$500
No setup fee
Additional Details
Pricing is based on how many contacts are imported into the Donor Management System. All packages have unlimited users, unlimited campaigns, unlimited peer-to-peer pages, unlimited emails and communications, and optional events and auctions. All packages also include support and data migration.
Pricing starts based on the CharityEngine core offering along with projected contact and email volume.
I used Network for the Good to run a fundraising event it was awesome. My organization is part of a larger regional non-profit dedicated to servicing those in our community who need a little help. By banding together under a larger regional organization, we can extend our impact through the utilization of Network for the Good across all associated organizations. It empowers smaller groups to have a larger impact on their community.
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.
Every organization you enter has to have a point of contact with their email address listed. The point of contact also has be entered separately as an individual. If you use “email all” to your donor list, the contact gets emailed twice. This seems like it would be easy to prevent in the system but it’s currently not possible.
Event ticketing is extremely limited unless you pay significantly more as an add-on. This should be included as a default feature.
Emails sent through the system can end up in spam filters. Given how much email gets sent through their system, they should find a way to overcome that.
We are still learning and rebuilding our nonprofit using this platform, so this year is a trial run to see how we can increase our network and our donations. So long as we are able to see a significant return on investment in terms of donations received through the platform, we will renew for next year.
BGF is an easy-to-use platform for entering, editing, and analyzing customer or donor data and giving. I would highly recommend it to any organization looking to improve its customer relationship management functionality. As a previous user of different CRM platforms with other non-profits, BGF has made tracking donor information and communicating with donors much easier.
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.
In 5+ years we have never had an issue with it not working when we needed it to. It is very reliable and doesn't seem to have a lot of bugs or interruptions in service.
It is always fast for us and reports have a very quick upload time. We don't integrate it into other programs so I'm not 100% sure about that, but it always works when we use it and is very reliable. Even when we run Excel files for complete information on donors, it always works very fast.
Most of the time they are quick and friendly and help me resolve any issues. There have only been a couple of times that we couldn't find a resolution and I was just told that NFG didn't have that capability.
We only had one hiccup with the domain that was an issue on our end but NFG struggled to help us. It was finally resolved and we've been good ever since
Givebutter is not as user friendly, even though it is fairly easy to use. Bonterra Network for Good has many of the same options for running donor campaigns but goes beyond in data tracking and user friendliness. Bonterra Network for Good is extremely easy to learn. The only downside is the cost factor.
We originally used it only for philanthropy and now our Outreach team is using it for newsletters, our Advocacy uses it for volunteers and tracking, and our Volunteer Coordinator puts in volunteer hours and in-kind donations.
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.
