CharityEngine vs. NationBuilder

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.

Incentivized

Excellent for local and state level political campaigns. Also has worked very well for some of our non-profit clients. We do not currently use the platform outside of these scenarios.

• Allows users to create unique queries to generate targeted data.
• Allows the entry of addresses from all around the world, not just US addresses.

Incentivized

• Store contact information
• Process online donations securely and accurately

Incentivized

• WYSIWYG editor is basic without the ability to customize and add custom fields. This is especially evident when compared to WordPress
• Donation functionality does not support fingerprint payments
• Email templates are difficult to customize compared to Constant Contact and MailChimp

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It is difficult to compare WordPress and NationBuilder because they are completely different. NationBuilder is a closed system that is specifically made to accomplish certain things. WordPress is largely an open source product with thousands of plugins, extensions, and expandability. However, because of its increased versatility, some clients gravitate toward WordPress over NationBuilder.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We've raised a lot of money through emails, petitions, and donations.
• We've increased our membership.
• We've improved our ability to mobilize membership.

Incentivized