Neon CRM vs. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

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

If you only want to track donations, I'd go with something simpler. If you want to track donations and programs and connections between them, there may be nothing better. If you have no technical abilities and no budget, restricted yourself solely to what it does as described exactly in the manual. If you can't devote about 0.25FTE to the constant maintenance and upgrades, don't go with it.

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

• Lots of connection points. I can associate a contact with an organization, an event and a donation, easily bouncing between them and pulling reports accordingly. Love this!
• This system has many more features than we will ever actually use but I love that because when we have a new idea or want to try something out we don't have to switch systems, we just have to dig a little deeper into salesforce and they probably have a solution waiting for us already.
• Salesforce is great at training! I love their trailhead and have used it a lot, especially when I was just getting to know the system. It is easy, fun, informative, and always there to teach me something new. I can also go at my own pace instead of many people's models of training through webinars that are almost always at inconvenient times.

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

• Learning curve - very powerful, but takes time to learn
• Batch processing - takes time and advanced skills to reach efficiency for data entry and certain operations which you want to do in batch
• Mass email is extremely limited - must choose a third party tool which adds complexity and cost to the system

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

There is really no other tool to compare and especially since Salesforce for Nonprofits is free!!

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

I think Salesforce has so much functionality that it makes it difficult in terms of overall usability. Once you can figure it out, it's a 10/10, it's just getting there. If you're willing to do the work to figure it out then you're golden. For what it's worth, I don't know if you're going to find something with this level of functionality that's easier to figure out

Incentivized

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

I would say the support for Salesforce for Nonprofits is overall pretty great, as they offer many avenues to find the information you need and offer nonprofits the ability to work with Salesforce-trained volunteers or professional for free, which is useful especially during the customization process. I will say that I have often encountered situations where I needed to figure out certain information that I could not find even amongst the vast network of knowledge they provide.

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

As a cloud native organization with no previous Microsoft infrastructure, Salesforce was a more logical and effective option for us. The suite of products was also far more comprehensive and required less customization. We were able to adopt a "configure not code" approach to our development of systems to support our mission that lowered the cost of upgrades.

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

• Salesforce for nonprofits is our source of truth for donor and member data.
• It's made a world of difference to know we only have to look in one place for an address or donation history.
• We have yet to connect Salesforce with our financial software (QBO) given the cost of the third-party connectors though I am investing a fewer lower cost options I have just found.

Incentivized