FrontStream Panorama vs. Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud

I am sure that FrontStream Panorama is well suited to process online donations. It did do that for us. But, that is about all it did. None of this information was ever successfully implemented to be pushed to Salesforce, which led to me manually entering a year's worth of data for our online gifts. I would not recommend this platform if your organization uses Salesforce to manage donor data.

Incentivized

If you only want to track donations, I'd go with something simpler. If you want to track donations and programs and connections between them, there may be nothing better. If you have no technical abilities and no budget, restricted yourself solely to what it does as described exactly in the manual. If you can't devote about 0.25FTE to the constant maintenance and upgrades, don't go with it.

Incentivized

• In the past they have supported this event well. The product functioned as advertised until this year.

• Lots of connection points. I can associate a contact with an organization, an event and a donation, easily bouncing between them and pulling reports accordingly. Love this!
• This system has many more features than we will ever actually use but I love that because when we have a new idea or want to try something out we don't have to switch systems, we just have to dig a little deeper into salesforce and they probably have a solution waiting for us already.
• Salesforce is great at training! I love their trailhead and have used it a lot, especially when I was just getting to know the system. It is easy, fun, informative, and always there to teach me something new. I can also go at my own pace instead of many people's models of training through webinars that are almost always at inconvenient times.

Incentivized

• To begin, the customer service at FrontStream Panorama is virtually nonexistent. After our implementation and connection to Salesforce we were having a lot of major issues. Unfortunately, it felt like our account manager and the general customer service at FrontStream Panorama did not care. It came to the point where our Chief of Development had to reach out to a higher executive in the company because 6 months into switching to their platform nothing was functional and no one was making any attempt to solve the problem.
• That leads me to my next point in that the Salesforce connection does not work. They spent close to a year "trying" to figure out why none of our data was being pushed from FrontStream Panorama to Salesforce and they continuously blamed Salesforce despite them assuring us that there were no issues on their end and despite it working seamlessly with our new platform. I don't believe they have the capacity to support these issues.
• For our Gala, we decided to use their Bidding for Good platform as an add-on to selling tickets for the event. Come the day of, the platform did not work. We were not able to sign in our guest electronically or collect their credit card information. Luckily I had paper copies of our guest list and table arrangements because if not it would have been a total disaster. It was so bad that we ended up getting a 100% refund.
• Lastly, when we switched over to FrontStream Panorama one of the key selling points was how you could customize almost everything in your page. However, it is almost impossible to do so unless you have a great understanding of code. This was not mentioned at all and led to a lot of frustration on behalf of our small team.

Incentivized

• Learning curve - very powerful, but takes time to learn
• Batch processing - takes time and advanced skills to reach efficiency for data entry and certain operations which you want to do in batch
• Mass email is extremely limited - must choose a third party tool which adds complexity and cost to the system

Incentivized

There is really no other tool to compare and especially since Salesforce for Nonprofits is free!!

Incentivized

I think Salesforce has so much functionality that it makes it difficult in terms of overall usability. Once you can figure it out, it's a 10/10, it's just getting there. If you're willing to do the work to figure it out then you're golden. For what it's worth, I don't know if you're going to find something with this level of functionality that's easier to figure out

Incentivized

They do not seem to care about the problems of their customers. They do not return phone calls. They do not provide the updates on their support page that they promised. They have had two weeks to repair the basic functionality of their system and they have been unable to do so. This is a complete failure as far as I am concerned.

I would say the support for Salesforce for Nonprofits is overall pretty great, as they offer many avenues to find the information you need and offer nonprofits the ability to work with Salesforce-trained volunteers or professional for free, which is useful especially during the customization process. I will say that I have often encountered situations where I needed to figure out certain information that I could not find even amongst the vast network of knowledge they provide.

Incentivized

Originally they provided a reliable product. I am not sure what has happened to their service.

As a cloud native organization with no previous Microsoft infrastructure, Salesforce was a more logical and effective option for us. The suite of products was also far more comprehensive and required less customization. We were able to adopt a "configure not code" approach to our development of systems to support our mission that lowered the cost of upgrades.

Incentivized

• Saves staff time
• Increases donor participation

Incentivized

• Salesforce for nonprofits is our source of truth for donor and member data.
• It's made a world of difference to know we only have to look in one place for an address or donation history.
• We have yet to connect Salesforce with our financial software (QBO) given the cost of the third-party connectors though I am investing a fewer lower cost options I have just found.

Incentivized