Blackbaud DonorCentral vs. Bloomerang CRM

Specific scenarios where Blackbaud DonorCentral is well suited are definitely in regards to our Development team. They can quickly update our constituent's memberships and keep our communications team in the loop on current member emails and those who are in need or renewals. It also helps with their development and fundraising events. They are keeping track of the highest donors and those big prospective donors for future events. Scenarios, where it is less appropriate, are definitely in my meetings department. It does not sync with our registration database for conferences, so we have to do double work verifying if they are members or not.

Incentivized

I can't speak to Bloomerang's functionality for a very large organization, but for a small-to-midsize non-profit, I don't know what else you'd need! Need to register volunteers, or sell tickets, or generate e- or print communications, or pull donor data? Bloomerang does it. Bloomerang is my third CRM tool in my current organization and it is vastly superior in almost every way to the others that came before.

Incentivized

• Has great security and privacy settings. Keeps your donor information safe.
• Has a direct link with donors to our information. Eliminates a lot of double work and or hitting the same donor with multiple emails.

Incentivized

• Website integration for online donations is awesome! It makes it so much easier to raise money online. We've tripled the amount of money we raise online, mainly because of this and the ability to send emails through the system.
• Emails are tracked directly in a donor's record, so we can see instantly their engagement with our content.
• Integration with DonorSearch is awesome and seems to be improving often.
• They listen to their customers' needs. If enough customers request a feature, they'll get it for us. We feel like the development of this software is always happening and it's a partnership, rather than a transaction.

Incentivized

• Doesn't interface with our Aventri Registration system.
• Has quite a few advertised features like SKY and DAF that don't get used that much and aren't as impressive as they say that are.

Incentivized

• Some of the searches did not bring up the expected results. It would be good to see the logic be a little more "fuzzy".
• More pre-set reports would be helpful for small organizations who do not understand the logic behind how to get the results they are seeking.
• An ability to just page through donor records would be nice. Sometimes you just want to browse the data to get inspired.

Incentivized

#1 - I am very happy with the product and support so far.
#2 - With significant data migration costs, I wouldn't even consider another option for at least 3 years no matter how much better it might be.

Incentivized

Data and settings are very customizable to fit the needs of our organization. We are able to not only keep track of donations, but also other interactions we may have with a constituent. Support is extremely helpful when issues arise.

Incentivized

I gave it a low rating because response times are slow. It does have multiple ways to reach support, but it usually takes a while before you "get in front" of the person you need to fix your issue. Also, problems seem to happen a lot, so it makes the process more frustrating.

Incentivized

Any time i had a problem or question it has been easy to find an answer or tutorial. When I cannot find an answer, it is easy to email or live chat with support and they resolve my problems very quickly.

I do not know of any other alternatives, as I do not work in the development department. Our Development team would have sourced alternatives to settle on this one.

Incentivized

Salesforce is infinitely customizable, but Bloomerang is pretty straightforward and works out of the box. It is simple enough that folks who are not familiar with the robust features of something like Salesforce can hit the ground running. Even as it is simple it is powerful as far as showing visuals that can help fundraising staff more clearly understand where the organization is and what donors they can next target for upcoming campaigns.

Incentivized

• Helps development team keep a clear and concise donor relationship.
• Accounting can forecast money coming in more accurately.

Incentivized

• Because my organization has been using Bloomerang for only one year, we haven't yet studied what impact it has had on our ROI. We have, however, noted that we are able to more efficiently and more rapidly communicate with constituents now than we were able to before we had Bloomerang. We can quickly and efficiently generate acknowledgements and tax receipts - and do so - better than we ever did before.

Incentivized