Neon CRM vs. WildApricot by Personify

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

It is well suited to our environment, that's why I chose it. Where it might not be as successful is in operations such as gyms, where specific areas or equipment need to be scheduled.

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

• Automate member renewals and provide reminders for members with automatic renewal
• Tracking of member donations and the ability for a member to retrieve detailed donation receipt/acknowledgement for a variety fo donation types (in-kind, cash, etc)
• Provide integration between membership records and the association's website - using either the integrated CMS or code snippets
• Track member financials - open invoices, paid invoices
• Enable event management for both free and paid events

• 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

• Query functionality could be improved to allow appropriate granularity for item selection.
• Enhancement requests take a long time. Feedback from development on enhancement requests seems to be lacking.

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

When compared to iMIS, Wild Apricot is an order of magnitude easier to implement and use. It is also a tool that can be administered without a considerable amount of outside support and expense. Wild Apricot is also a more fully integrated system that does not require complicated module licensing and the associated costs. iMIS is also much more expense than Wild Apricot Ultimate Membership Pro (UMP) is a WordPress plugin solution for managing association memberships. Since this is an add-on software, the cost is a small faction of the expense associated with Wild Apricot. The feature set of Wild Apricot is more extensive than the capabilities of of UMP, however, Wild Apricot is easier to use and understand that UMP. Being a hosted solution, Wild Apricot is also much more stable and predictable.

• 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

• Has helped us track our participants' arc through our series of workshop
• Has helped us keep track of demographics of registrants to ensure we are reaching a diverse set of practitioners

Incentivized