Neon CRM vs. Neon Fundraise

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

Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound) is well suited to third-party fundraising. We use it for our walk fundraiser, and we enjoy the level of interactivity and customization it offers our constituents. It also makes donation entry and reporting fairly easy, so it would be well suited for operations with vast numbers of donations in cash, check, and credit. It might be less suited to events with a handful of large donations from corporate benefactors.

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

• Reports are easy to access and easy to run.
• We like that it gives walkers latitude to customize their walker site.
• It is better than our previous service (Convio) at giving local managers access to fix errors in the system on behalf of individual walkers (e.g., wrong address or team name).

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.

Incentivized

• Rallybound usually has a website glitch once a month that our team has to address. An example of this is that our fundraising numbers are sometimes being skewed or pages are deleted from the website. Rallybound fixes these issues quickly, but they should not occur in the first place.
• Rallybound should update their email platform. We used to send coaching emails about fundraising from their system, but we now use Pardot because the templates are more appealing and easier to navigate.
• Rallybound needs to ensure that their sales team and their web team are on the same page at all times. Sometimes our organization is told we are able to do certain things, but then find out it is not possible when it is further discussed. This wastes time on all fronts.

Incentivized

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

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

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.

Incentivized

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

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

I was not a part of the evaluation process when Rallybound was selected. Classy was one of our top three choices, however, when we decided to eventually go with Rallybound. I do know that my team continues to look for the best platform to use, and Classy is always discussed.

Incentivized

• 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

• The time we have saved because RB exports directly into Salesforce is huge.
• We have exponentially less users call with questions about creating their pages.

Incentivized