FrontStream Panorama vs. Blackbaud TeamRaiser

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.

Incentivized

It was well suited for our peer to peer events and not appropriate for our ticketed events.

Incentivized

• In the past they have supported this event well. The product functioned as advertised until this year.

• Offers the ability to really customize a campaign on TeamRaiser.
• Provides milestones/badges that can be earned for participants.
• Provides custom pages that can be easily linked to a campaign.
• Gives the ability to send coaching emails to participants and for participants to send emails through the TeamRaiser system.
• Has a big support community.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Too many options so it can be hard to navigate.
• Requires a deeper HTML understanding to really get the most out of it.
• Would be better if the interface was similar to other original Blackbaud products.

Continued use will ensure an ongoing increase in this type of revenue and provides an alternative way of raising funds for our supporters.

It can be overly complex and requires a deeper HTML understanding than most outside of IT have.

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.

Great and easy to access to get support to resolve issues immediately.

Having a better understanding of product and objectives prior to implementation would lead to more success.

Originally they provided a reliable product. I am not sure what has happened to their service.

While everydayheroPro and CrowdRise are easy to set up, already mobile friendly, have great interfaces, and are customizable, they lack some base capabilities that come with TeamRaiser, such as the ability to control the donation form, email capability, database syncing, badges/milestones, and custom pages. The everydayheroPro system has great potential, and we use it for our smaller DIY campaigns, but its support knowledge bank and customization is still so limited and can be frustrating to use because of it.

Incentivized

• Saves staff time
• Increases donor participation

Incentivized

• Introduced our constituents to DIY fundraising.
• Provided another revenue stream that provides nearly $100,000 extra a year.
• Gets our constituents involved in the cause in another way.
• We've found a niche by using TeamRaiser in companies.
• Has provided more donor interaction for lower-tier giving groups that might otherwise receive little communication and stewardship from us.
• Seen returning participants raise more money year-after-year.

Incentivized