Bonterra Salsa vs. DonorSnap

As I mentioned before, I was the decision maker for Salsa CRM. I worked in software prior to moving to nonprofit. I reviewed several software platforms. Salsa CRM was the most intuitive and met my needs as a whole.

Incentivized

We reviewed more than 100 donor management software applications and found DonorSnap to be right for our organization. Sure, there are the 800 lb gorillas out there, but their cost was overall not economical for our financial budget. The DonorSnap platform is rich with features and their online support is quick to respond.

In the beginning, one of our concerns was a potential learning curve in understanding the application. Frankly speaking, it is easy to navigate once you play around with it, attend a webinar and watch some of their help videos. We were not intimidated and are happy with our choice.

There is probably not a donor management software that is perfect. We like that there are many user-defined fields which provide greater adaptability to meet our needs. No need for custom work.

Incentivized

• Managing donations - Salsa helps keep track of the donations coming in whether they are a one-time donation or a series of donations.
• Automatic email series (set it up once and it will run without you once you initiate the trigger point.)
• This software also allows you to set up roles within the company for controlling access to things like donations and data entry.

Incentivized

• The software is rich with features.
• Their online support is quick to respond.
• Many user-defined fields which provide greater adaptability to meet our needs.
• Easy to navigate.

Incentivized

• With the constant updates comes challenges. Often times, with an update comes several small bugs that Salsa has to work to fix.
• I believe their customer support works from home so it is challenging to get a concrete answer on the first phone call. It often takes several follow ups.
• The implementation was a bit rocky but customer service worked with us a lot and we got through it! We were moving from google drive and several other platforms for ticket sales, emails, etc. so we didn't have any experience with this. It eventually all worked out and the Salsa team really stepped up to accommodate our needs.

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• I really can't think of a thing!

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It suits all of our needs.

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You do not have to be a tech-savvy person to be able to use the CRM. Reporting is easy to do.

Incentivized

Their tech support is very good and I am very pleased with it. They speak in non-techie lingo for my non-techie staff just as easily as they speak techie to me (a techie). I appreciate their quick turn around in time to answer our questions and the follow up to make sure their answer(s) helped.

Incentivized

Classy is about the same cost per month. Classy was really good at peer-to-peer and crowdfunding. Salsa encompasses many more facets of a nonprofit. With Classy, we also had to have an email company and manage our supporters in a different program. Now, we do all three of those things together. Although Mailchimp is pretty straight forward and nice to use, I prefer the email capabilities of Salsa. I think this is because Mailchimp didn't have direct access to all the donor information and we had to use Zapier to communicate between our donor information and Mailchimp. Now, Salsa has some clever tools that allow you to both automate and manually send out emails.

Incentivized

Without a doubt, DonorSnap does everything that I need, without causing fits of anger - unlike the previously listed programs! Reporting was an issue with all of the others; not so with DS. Being able to create a report and export into Excel to manipulate makes so much sense and the job so much easier to work with.

Incentivized

• Upon using Salsa, our financial records are much easier to review and compare over time
• Salsa allows Foundation staff to quickly look up donor records and identify what steps need to be taken to cultivate and steward them better

Incentivized

• We spend so much less time doing data entry and generating reports than we spent with our previous four database providers. This is a very inexpensive donor management system in comparison with the others that we have used saving us thousands of dollars annually.
• DonorSnap has more than met our business objectives of being able to track donors, donations, payments, registrations, etc. Working from the cloud provides me with quick access to information regardless of location - even the mobile app is great!

Incentivized