Bonterra Salsa vs. Neon CRM

As I mentioned before, I was the decision maker for Salsa CRM. I worked in software prior to moving to nonprofit. I reviewed several software platforms. Salsa CRM was the most intuitive and met my needs as a whole.

Incentivized

If you are looking for a CRM to track your donations and store all donor information, this is a great product. There are tabs under each entry (individual and corporate/foundation donors) to store notes, donation information, and more. Donations entered automatically integrate into the donation campaign section so you can easily track total donation amounts. It is very user friendly and does not require extreme tech knowledge to use effectively. I feel confident storing our information in this CRM. It is very useful to go back to look at past donor information when soliciting new grants and donations.

Incentivized

• Managing donations - Salsa helps keep track of the donations coming in whether they are a one-time donation or a series of donations.
• Automatic email series (set it up once and it will run without you once you initiate the trigger point.)
• This software also allows you to set up roles within the company for controlling access to things like donations and data entry.

Incentivized

• The setup and import process was very effective. The team looked at our account import data and recommended ways to format it and explain how it would best be translated into the NEON system.
• The deduplicate tool is effective and easy to use. The step-by-step system allows a record with multiple addresses to be combined into one account, or added to a household or left as is.
• It works! We've used other systems that are nightmarish. This system is easy to use and the detailed training videos get into more of the nitty-gritty in a clear and extremely helpful way.
• Customising form fields was extremely important and easy to do. MailChimp integration using reports from this customization is clutch.

Incentivized

• With the constant updates comes challenges. Often times, with an update comes several small bugs that Salsa has to work to fix.
• I believe their customer support works from home so it is challenging to get a concrete answer on the first phone call. It often takes several follow ups.
• The implementation was a bit rocky but customer service worked with us a lot and we got through it! We were moving from google drive and several other platforms for ticket sales, emails, etc. so we didn't have any experience with this. It eventually all worked out and the Salsa team really stepped up to accommodate our needs.

Incentivized

• Learning the ropes is largely accomplished by reading manuals and watching videos. I don't learn that way. I'd much prefer to be shown. I guess I'm old school.
• They can be stingy with the customer support. We bought the big package and I still wind up going back to my salesperson to help me cut through any red tape to get what I need.

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It suits all of our needs.

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Neon CRM was difficult and frustrating to use without IT experience, and way to costly for the a small to mid-sized nonprofit. We believe that we lost donors due to the inaccurate report system in Neon CRM

You do not have to be a tech-savvy person to be able to use the CRM. Reporting is easy to do.

Incentivized

The Neon CRM system is confusing (we had to watch video tutorials and html code to understand many of the features, many of which we did not need). Around 2022, Neon started to go downhill. Bells and whistles were added that were of no benefit (to our nonprofit) and the system became even harder to use

Their tech support is very good and I am very pleased with it. They speak in non-techie lingo for my non-techie staff just as easily as they speak techie to me (a techie). I appreciate their quick turn around in time to answer our questions and the follow up to make sure their answer(s) helped.

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As stated before, they push you to read the manual or watch the video when what I want is a human being to walk/talk me through it. Like I said, maybe I am old school but that's how I learn. It's been a challenge.

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We had to hire someone to implement our donors into Neon CRM

Classy is about the same cost per month. Classy was really good at peer-to-peer and crowdfunding. Salsa encompasses many more facets of a nonprofit. With Classy, we also had to have an email company and manage our supporters in a different program. Now, we do all three of those things together. Although Mailchimp is pretty straight forward and nice to use, I prefer the email capabilities of Salsa. I think this is because Mailchimp didn't have direct access to all the donor information and we had to use Zapier to communicate between our donor information and Mailchimp. Now, Salsa has some clever tools that allow you to both automate and manually send out emails.

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Neon vs. The Raiser's Edge Raiser's Edge is the gold standard for fundraising-focused CRM applications. However, it is so complicated that there are higher ed courses and certificate programs you can take to learn it all. The printed manual is hundreds of pages long. You can do TONS with it, of course, but on the other hand you could spend months mastering just one of its many functions. It is based on architecture from long ago, so it's not slick or user friendly -despite attempts to modernize with a couple of coats of paint (see RE:NXT). Not to mention it is very pricey indeed. If that's not what you need or want, you can turn to Neon CRM as an alternative. Neon has both feet firmly planted in user experience and it will get the job done for basic reporting, email integration, donation processing, easy to read dashboards, it's portable to any device (nothing to download, no servers to host locally or otherwise) and pretty easy to learn. That is why I would recommend it for most users

Incentivized

• Upon using Salsa, our financial records are much easier to review and compare over time
• Salsa allows Foundation staff to quickly look up donor records and identify what steps need to be taken to cultivate and steward them better

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• NeonCRM helped our organization during a growth phase to get organized and get almost all of the data into one place.
• Because the tool doesn't have a simple way to invoice clients, some of the ways we are taking payments from them create a lot more work to reorganize each month.

Incentivized