Blackbaud NetCommunity vs. Greater Giving

For those using the events module, NetCommunity is great, though if you do a lot of walk/run type of events where individuals sponsor other individuals, something like TeamRaiser might make more sense. If you don't have the staff resources for web developers dedicated to fundraising tasks, then NetCommunity is a great tool. It's not as customisable as an experienced programmer/developer might want, but it still has a lot of options. It also has a lot of nuance, and if you cannot make an investment of time or money into getting staff trained, it's not going to work out well.

Incentivized

Greater Giving is well suited for an organization that is looking to save money on their event software and need a full service solution. It is not as sophisticated as others on the market, but it will allow you to get everything you need done for a reasonable price. This is meant to be used by nonprofit event professionals.

Incentivized

• Email marketing efforts are more targeted and now have a higher response rate. This equates to increased fundraising dollars.
• A/B split testing has allowed us to further tailor content that is preferred by our audience. This targeting allows us to be more successful in gaining conversions, event registrations, etc.

Incentivized

• Greater Giving is very user-friendly for both staff and volunteers
• Greater Giving sales and receipt generating features are well received by the guest at our event
• Greater Giving provides excellent customer support - in particular, their "night of" event support

Incentivized

• NetCommunity has very simple analytics. It would be great to be able to see more in depth information on how constituents are reacting to the email they receive.
• Though it is simple to construct an email, making a complex design can be challenging due to the limitations of the design tool.
• Although A/B testing is available within NetCommunity, it is not easy to set up.

Incentivized

• Love to see more places to log expenses, so you can run a total report of net income.
• It's often a bit wide for my screen, which I can work around.

Incentivized

The only reason for this is due to the fact that we are only using the product for a specific purpose that is not directly tied to the newsletters. There are better products out there for what we are doing with grant processing. We will most likely move to a new software instead of renewing for our purposes

Incentivized

The interface with Raiser's Edge and the many different ways our users can interact with the website are a big plus for us. Event registrations are our most popular transaction type and having this on line makes our lives much easier.

Incentivized

Greater Giving is very intuitive. It’s easy to set up in the backend and change as needed. Anytime we couldn’t figure something out on our own, our customer service representative was always available and super helpful!

Incentivized

Product is stable is up 99.99% of the time. As a hosted customer, we do experience some minor downtime when routers or switches malfunction. We feel the downtime has been minimal and the communications around these outages has been good.

Blackbaud NetCommunity uses .NET technology. It can be sluggish at times if not optimized, but overall we have been pleased with the performance when handling large volumes of traffic.

Blackbaud NetCommunity and all of the Blackbaud products have a great support system. Blackbaud NetCommunity offers support through phone calls, chats, online, and email. Their response time is very quick and the support analysts work with you to resolve issues in a very timely matter. If they do not personally know the answer they will direct you to another support analyst that will be able to assist in a resolution.

Incentivized

Online support was one of the worst customer service experiences I've ever had (I would give them a 1). Phone support and implementation support were very nice and knowledgeable.

As expected. Courseware was a nice reference guide.

I truly wish that "0" was an option. I never really pin-pointed whether the implementation issues that we had were caused by Blackbaud, or if it was part of a larger issue that began in-house.

Incentivized

We started out with Blackbaud NetCommunity but eventually switched to Blackbaud's Online Express. Online Express offered more features and was included with the upgrade to Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge NXT. Blackbaud NetCommunity did meet most of our needs and was a great starting point for our e-communications and online forms within our website.

Incentivized

We currently use Eventbrite for our pre-event ticket and sponsorship sales as they have a much more streamlined webpage that is customizable, they allow us to pass on the fees to our purchasers, AND they do not charge an annual fee on top of the processing fees. However, they do not have the ability to let you swipe a credit card in advance - you need a membership to Bidding for Good to do so. We tried using Eventbrite and Bidding for Good for only 1 event before we switched back to Greater Giving. Neither platform allowed you to send out tax receipts and the on-site event management was subpar compared to the ease of Greater Giving.

Incentivized

• We are able to manage quick turn-around when needed for Event pages and registration.
• Integration with Raiser's Edge is certainly efficient
• I believe the unsubscribe functionality is potentially removing folks permanently from all of our communications for one small reason, thus eliminating future fundraising opportunities because they cannot be selective.

Incentivized

• Having one system that can manage online donations, ticket purchases, online auction, donor tax letters, etc. has created efficiency for my org.
• Reports are flawed and lack of data integration with other systems causes me to do a lot of unnecessary manual work.