Bonterra Salsa is a donor and constituent management system that helps
nonprofits build donor profiles, track every interaction, cultivate major
gifts, and report on all development activities. The platform includes mobile-ready digital marketing tools for email, social, and online
donation forms.
Additional features
include donor cultivation, donation processing of all gift types, direct mail,
built in word processing, mail merge,
powerful query tool, event/auction…
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CharityEngine
Score 4.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
CharityEngine is designed to simplify the complex world of online fundraising for nonprofits, as a nonprofit CRM. Integrated tools for donations, emails, and other elements of fundraising feed data into a central view to make it easier to know and care for donors. The solution boasts secure, payment-ready forms to give users complete control of donors' information.
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Pricing
Bonterra Salsa
CharityEngine
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$350-$700
per month
Professional
$700-$1,500
per month
Enterprise
Call for Customized Pricing
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bonterra Salsa
CharityEngine
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Pricing starts based on the CharityEngine core offering along with projected contact and email volume.
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.
CharityEngine has the POTENTIAL to be a good CRM, but both unresponsiveness to the more complex problems go unresolved for months at a time. Employee turnover is huge, which is likely because upper management is doing nothing to solve the internal problems. I would NOT recommend this CRM at this point. While CharityEngine does allow reasonably robust storage and querying of data if you plan to send emails through your CRM, look elsewhere. CharityEngine's framework is clunky and counter-intuitive, in addition to frequently just not working at all.
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.
There are a lot of frustrating things about the general usage of CharityEngine. It syncs with a nine-digit zip code database, but doesn't automatically populate exportable fields with this data - it must be manually requested for each record. Buttons that allow a user to quickly move to a specific area of the data in a customer record frequently stop working after updates; are found by users and reported, and then take a month or longer to be fixed. A clunky and counter-intuitive "creative" database frequently fails completely and is always slow.
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.
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.
CharityEngine has allowed our organization to grow in the past few years, but it has not kept up with industry trends and avoids making changes and updates requested by users.
Our overall business objectives cannot be met with CharityEngine alone. We must export data and use other applications to generate the data we need.
