Blackbaud Altru vs. Causeview

Destinations with both membership/donations and admissions will benefit from Altru's capability to track revenue from all angles. As a pretty robust system, you'll find many ways to utilize Altru including through mailings and mailing lists, major donor moves management, merchandise, and online forms.

Causeview is a bloated, outdated, and expensive tool that is not well suited for any scenario. Salesforce.com offers many better nonprofit and donor management applications at a better price. Causeview's data model is rigid and does not match Salesforce's standard data model, which makes it difficult to add other apps and integrations to Salesforce. Causeview's donate pages are bland and not very customizable. Also, Causeview's servers are not reliable and will go down unexpectedly, which also causes donate pages to go down. Last year, this happened on Giving Tuesday, a very important day for nonprofit fundraising.

Incentivized

• Instant sharing of data across departments. When a visitor's address is updated at the front desk, that information is available immediately to our development staff.
• 360 degree view of our visitors. We can see all of a visitor's activity -- when they're coming to the museum, what events they attend -- which gives us a better understanding of their needs.
• Altru can be accessed from anywhere. If we hold an event off-site, we can still handle admissions/registrations so long as there is a network.
• Altru Tech Support is awesome! They are very patient and, if they don't know the answer, they find out for you.

• Causeview's support team is mostly helpful and quick to respond.
• Causeview integrates event registrations within Salesforce.

Incentivized

• Custom querying features can be cumbersome to build and don't always give you the results you expect.
• Online payments cannot always be re-designated, which can be difficult with high level donors and board members make pledge payments through an online form and then they cannot be re-designated to their pledge.
• Multiple donor or membership programs can be difficult to manage.

Incentivized

• Event registration and donation pages could be better designed - not up to par with sites such as Eventbrite
• I would like to have the option for people to register with more than one e-mail address instead of creating a duplicate record each time someone uses a different e-mail.
• Some of my coworkers find Causeview confusing to use or difficult to find information.

Incentivized

They are always available and very knowledgable. Many times I am able to come up with a solution before they've finished troubleshooting just by having talked through it with them. I really appreciate the Chat feature to answer simple questions in a timely fashion. The training I received was top notch and very detailed.

Incentivized

Causeview's support is a lone bright spot. They are often quick to respond. They are generally helpful, although brief in their answers and explanations. I would appreciate more detailed answers to technical problems, but I do appreciate their support's problem solving ability

Incentivized

Having used multiple databases to collect data from visitors across all of our points of contact, we found we had information, but no comparison between areas. It was possible to have a volunteer who made a donation, bought a membership, made purchases in the shop, and attended a workshop, but only visited the galleries 1x a year. The result was to have power users without knowing it. While each of the products we had used were fine in their own right, they lacked the ability to tell us what we most needed to know - how often we were used across all of our points of service. Altru gave us that.

Incentivized

I did not personally select Causeview for my organization, but I have found it easy to use in comparison with other similar systems. The fact that Causeview can be added to Salesforce, and hop on our existing database, is very important to us and is one of the main reasons we continue to use the service.

Incentivized

• It has become very tedious to account for registrants in each session of a class or camp, because you have to "sell" them into each session in order to have an accurate class roster.
• It is very easy to process payment and entry fees to our Museum and programs.
• It is easy to retrieve accurate information and records of patrons.

Incentivized

• Able to track donor behavior and relationships with different corporations
• Helped us to track our corporate fundraising strategy -- which companies are we cultivating, which have we had success with, etc.
• Overall Causeview is an effective way for us to keep track of all of our donor information.

Incentivized