Blackbaud Grantmaking (formally GIFTS Online) is part of Blackbaud’s extensive portfolio of software, services, data intelligence and expertise that powers social good. Blackbaud Grantmaking delivers grantmaking capabilities configured to meet the user's needs, and to improve efficiency with personalized online grant applications and report forms, personalized user dashboards, and simplified financial processing tools. By providing access to giving data, including standard, advanced, and ad hoc…
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Bonterra EveryAction
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Bonterra EveryAction enables nonprofits to increase efficiency, optimize supporter and prospect interactions, and raise more money by providing expansive fundraising, digital, and organizing tools on a unified CRM.
Most of the ones used / evaluated were 2012 (or older) and most of them do not exist any more. We Started with Gifts ONLINE and continued with Blackbaud when they bought GIFTS.
As I have said it is extremely versatile. However it can also be confusing. There is always room for improvement. Blackbaud provides extensive online training, good response time from the help desk, a method of recommending enhancements as well as interaction with other users …
CyberGrants and Blackbaud are fairly comparable. CyberGrants offers conditional logic but Blackbaud is a company that appears to be more situated for future innovation. Blackbaud in general has better pricing.
At the time that I used GrantedGE, the product was in the development stages and there were a lot of bugs and issues with functionality. The customer service didn't have the bandwidth to quickly respond to issues. BlackBaud's customer service and history in the field are …
Blackbaud Grantmaking had the features I needed at a reasonable cost for an organization our size, given that we don't accept online proposals or reporting yet. I needed the ability to: manually enter proposal data, link to GuideStar, import public charity status info, check …
We also looked at Good Done Great and a couple others. CyberGrants was actually our top choice, but the previous CEO didn't want to sell his product to oil companies or other businesses he disagreed with.
We thought the other systems were much more affordable and some had better features. However, we were locked into a contract with MicroEdge/Blackbaud, so had to stick with them until our contract expires. If the pricing were better we might consider staying when the contract …
Four years ago when we first considered Blackbaud Grantmaking, two software providers presented demonstrations of their products to our foundation. We reviewed Good Done Great and Foundant, but found that Blackbaud Grantmaking had more features and the functionality we were …
We replaced action network with Bonterra Development + Digital EveryAction because of the native integration into the voter activation network on NGP Van. It reduced the number of logins required, as well as the number of platforms we needed to maintain and have access to. The …
Nation Builder—I would say this is a very pared-down version of VAN that requires extensions and outside software to do about 80% of what VAN can do natively. NB does have a better geocoding system that can geocode a location with just the address and does not require …
In addition to the products listed above, I have also used many proprietary tools developed by the organization. I find Bonterra Development + Digital to be easy to setup and use, especially for smaller organizations with limited staff and resources. Many nonprofits are unable …
There's a bit more functionality that does not require coding with EveryAction compared to Tessitura. Blackbaud wasn't particularly user friendly and I probably would not use it again. I will say that I would want a mashup of Tessitura and EveryAction if I had my druthers, …
Our organization uses both SalesForce and EveryAction and the two programs work well together. SalesForce is our main database for maintaining donor and constituent information but does not allow us the ability to send mass emails, messages, and appeals. EveryAction is also …
I used Blackbaud at a University setting, which I believe was very appropriate. The database needed many people that were just in charge of keeping the database clean - so for a large organization, it worked well. However, for a small organization it would be far too complicated.
Blackbaud is a Cadillac, and not needed by most small nonprofits of 3 million or less in income. We looked at several prior to choosing EveryAction. We are very pleased with EveryAction but wish that the training was more involved from a corporate perspective and that customer …
Jotform is very user-friendly and easy to use, but the reporting features don't even come close to what EveryAction can do. The fact that you can schedule reports from EveryAction puts it on a whole other level than Jotform. I have also used databases like Sure Impact, mPact …
Both are fairly good databases to use for data. I believe EveryAction has a better interface when it comes to tracking engagements and conversations. Aristotle price is a tad better.
It's completely different in my opinion, it doesn't serve the same purposes as those and is unique in what it does for our organization. The only thing it's comparable is to Airtable in terms of collecting & organizing data.
For me, the problem with comparing EveryAction is that it tries to do so much that it's hard to compare it to a single tool. Most of the online organizing tools it is usually contrasted with aren't yet on TrustRadius (e.g. Action Network, New/Mode, etc.). We lump these online …
Action Network is better, cheaper, and does the same thing as EveryAction. In all honesty, we are abandoning EveryAction in the coming months and transition to Action Network because we are tired of paying high rates for an unwieldy tools with poor support services. Again, we …
EA is more than 3x the cost of Active Campaign! We only chose EA due to their non-profit specific features.. ActiveCampaign uses terms not familiar to most non-profit teams (contract, prospect, funnel, etc.) and doesn't allow the customization of these labels. However, …
As I mentioned, cost is prohibitive for us. Because it is highly customizable, it is very powerful, but if you are looking for an intuitive, easy to use solution right "out of the box" solution because you have few staff and no IT dept. this may not be the best fit (unless they develop some lower cost / less customizable options?). That being said, we have managed to implement successfully with no IT. I completed the implementation, code the application and online reporting forms (using HTML) and use Blueprint to customize what we need, but it has been a big learning curve and an investment of time to manage the back end of the program. I will say that training new general users is pretty straight forward so their ability to search for information they need and quickly is greatly enhanced. The automatic customized reports and reminders are pretty great, and the overall integrity of our processes and data are greatly improved. Sometimes we wonder if it is overly complex and if there is a way e could "hide" more of the aspects that are not relevant to us, or that we are not using, so we can have a cleaner interface.
Bonterra EveryAction is a good CRM to use if your company has institutional fundraisers, grants, and individual fundraising, as it is suited to manage the processes that go along with all of those. I've heard that SalesForce has more functionality than Bonterra EveryAction, but I think that Bonterra EveryAction has plenty to learn and is extremely useful.
Custom reporting: in addition to providing many standard reports, Blackbaud Grantmaking makes it very easy to create and save custom reports. Writing effective queries is simple and requires no knowledge of SQL (though you have an option to write SQL queries if you prefer).
Robust template system: Blackbaud Grantmaking's Document Template Manager greatly facilitates our written communications with applicants. Approval/decline letters, check letters, and proposal summaries are just a few of the documents we generate on a daily basis, and unlike some other systems we've used, you don't have to export the data from Blackbaud Grantmaking before using it in a mail merge document. The Document Template Manager integrates with Microsoft Word.
Managing multiple funding sources: We have over a dozen foundation clients who have supported hundreds of organizations over the years. Blackbaud Grantmaking makes it very simple to keep the client data separated, even when multiple clients are contributing to the same organizations.
Blackbaud Grantmaking is a budget-friendly document management system. We have documents associated with organizations (e.g., IRS letters), individual grant requests (applications, budgets, approval letters, etc.), requirements (grant evaluations and reports), and payments (check letters) and it is very easy to save and search for these documents when they are needed. Blackbaud Grantmaking makes is easy to keep everything where it belongs (and move documents when you misfile them).
Some people find the Create A List tool more intuitive than other record-querying equivalents, which can make it easier for digital organizers to target and segment bulk emails, broadcast texts, door-knocking sheets, etc.
The ability to add custom fields on both Contact and Contribution records allows for some flexibility in making the system adapt to your organizing model
There aren't a lot of other tools out there that make phone banking quite as accessible
EveryAction's Email Series/Automations allow for some pretty sophisticated things to run mostly on their own, from welcome and reactivation series, to drip campaigns
For the most technical EveryAction users, the ability to customize online form appearance and functionality using callback functions allows for pretty intricate customization of submitter experiences (e.g. redirecting form submitters to different destinations based on how they filled out the form)
System enhancement ideas must be submitted to a community portal and other users must take the initiative to vote on their favorite ideas instead of vendor programmers collecting received ideas and doing the work themselves.
Lack of conditional logic in online application
Communication with other Blackbaud products notably Employee Volunteering and Engagement (fka AngelPoints)
Tech support resolutions and turnaround time (when going through basic channels).
Continuity of the software—We recently lost a feature we had enjoyed for the first several months and were told that it is "not currently possible" with our version of VAN—even though we had it.
I wish you could see ALL bulk uploads at ALL times, not just the last 100 batches or lines.
As long as there is continued development in the product allowing us to create efficiencies, streamline operations, deliver on our reporting requirements and the usability for internal and external partners remains strong we would have no reason to look elsewhere from a systems perspective. If costs changed substantially we'd have to look at different options to meet our cost savings objectives.
We will never us EA, nor recommend them to another org, simply based on their failed promises to deliver training, on-boarding and then charging our account during our free 3 month period, then after cancelling the contract their legal department tried to force us to sign a cancellation agreement that barred us from writing reviews, making comments, etc!
There is room for improvement and the development of the software seem slow. As customers, we hear a lot about what's in development and promises of new features rolling out. However, it feels like those developments take a really long time to show up in they system for my day-to-day use.
It's just so easy--there isn't a lot of techy lingo or graphics, so a regular person can log in and have a sense of what does what. There might be a few terms you need to learn, but everything is in common English so you can almost always find what you're looking for.
The only issue I have had with availability is when I don't have my work phone with me, which prevents me from providing a multi-factor authentication code to access the portal. Other than that, I have not had an issue with availability or outages.
I feel like product support and training should go hand in hand. Having to pay $5k to learn how to use a database is absolutely ridiculous and should be offered with the cost of your database, as it is with every other database I've ever used in the last 10 years of my career. With that being said, once I took the training, I found that the support was much more available. Having training and support behind a paywall is bad business in my opinion
They went through all the features and explained in easy-to-digest details what features the system had. They were also responsive to questions we had. We were able to check in with the support team after training and received prompt followups that helped supplement the training after we had real-world experience using the system.
It natively integrated with NGP Van extremely well. it also integrated very well with our zoom platform and our use of the Mobilize platform. The bulk upload feature allowed us to move large amounts of initial data into the platform easily. The removal of duplicates was also a fairly easy task.
As I have said it is extremely versatile. However it can also be confusing. There is always room for improvement. Blackbaud provides extensive online training, good response time from the help desk, a method of recommending enhancements as well as interaction with other users and enhancements are scored by users to determine the importance of enhancements to users.
I liked Action Network in that it was very user friendly. However, it didn't have the magnitude of features that EveryAction provides. But I appreciated the level of basic knowledge needed to use this to its extent of services. I kind of miss how easy it was to navigate and create when writing a newsletter. EveryAction has the special features that I need to update such as the domain.
It has given us the ability to make grants faster. Example: one donor wanted applications to 50 grantees in a short period of time. Even with other items of work on my agenda, having to research where at least 30% of these grantees were since this was their first time getting a grant and going back and finding other ways to contact these grantees- old and new- when the people were not longer at the organization, it got done by me alone in less than two days.
Blackbaud Grantmaking allows us to keep track of everything from how many times a grant has been given to an organization as well as the amount donors have given.
Because of Blackbaud Grantmaking I can create a grant and process letters for payments faster than I can get a check for the grantee, thus making it harder on the finance office to keep up with what I am doing.
We are able to make informed fundraising decisions. We can easily see what campaigns were successful so that we know where to invest our time. We expect to see improved fundraising performance.
Saving time on data collection: Having automated reports on donations and grant funds raised is a huge time saver. Rather than spending hours once a quarter pulling information out of a bulky Excel sheet, we can simply refresh the reports we've set up and visualize the data anytime.
Saved money on other softwares since Bonterra EveryAction is a one stop shop: We've been able to cancel the subscription to our email marketing company since we send all our campaigns through the software. We are also able to send surveys and to host our donation page.
