Keela reviews

Keela has been highly responsive and quick to evolve to meet the practical needs of its customers.

Pluspunten:

I like the simplicity of Keela however, it's important to point out that the simplicity doesn't compromise how useful the tool is. They've stripped down the CRM model to make it exactly what fundraisers at small and medium size charity need and got rid of all the extra widgets that just make tracking donor data unnecessarily complicated. We have also greatly appreciated the quick response time of the support team. Multiple features that we have suggested would be useful have shown up in new iterations of the product and the team regularly checks in with us to make sure that we are happy.

Minpunten:

The dashboard isn't the best. I would appreciate being able to customize it to be able to see the information that is important to you at a glance.

Very happy with our experience!

Opmerkingen: Overall we are very happy. Keela is easy to use and has helped us improve our donor experience. Our staff can now check donor accounts and see all relationship details at a glance.

Pluspunten:

As a smaller charity we are most impressed with the integrated features on Keela. Being able to direct our donors to give online and know that they will automatically receive a tax receipt and thank you makes us very happy. Tax receipts are now branded and our charity is listed on our donors credit card bill. This helps tremendously with brand recognition! We are now able to save a lot in administration costs by no longer having to be dependant on third party processors. More importantly than money saved is the improved donor experience that we can now provide. We never have to direct our supporters to a third party to resend tax receipts, update credit card information, stop or increase monthly donation, etc. The BCC and FWD email features are a real time saver as well!

Minpunten:

There are some features that need improvement to completely satisfy our needs but we find Keela always makes the effort to continually improve their product and is open to suggestions through their Ideas Portal. At the moment our biggest challenges with the software are: limitations in reporting, e-blast design features are limited and donor interactions are not able to be imported.

Keela Review

Opmerkingen: So far it has been good, I am happy with our choice and the abilities, I think with some key enhancements this could be a really great platform.

Pluspunten:

I like the overall donor management options including importing donations from other sources, the ability to soft credit, adding volunteer hours, etc. The cost of the software if excellent and it links to several other programs we use. Customer Service is great when I do reach out for help.

Minpunten:

I would the forms to be more dynamic, right now I have to create too many forms. An example if a campaign we did for a free sticker, within the campaign we wanted to offer the donor a chance to pay for the sticker shipping and possible donate something extra. I couldn't do this in one form, I needed a for ​the free part and separate from if they wanted to donate. Overall I think the forms could be improved to allow for more flexibility​, I would like to have some of the questions like "pay for the fee" to default to Yes. Pulling reporting from specific forms is not easy, we use this for tour registrations and it is cumbersome to get to the responses sorted by tour day, overall forms could be more efficient​ and enhanced. I would also like to see a mobile app.

Keela "Thinks" Like We "Think"

Opmerkingen: I'm sorry that, when a person reads the "cons," it probably sounds like I'm "dissing" the software. But the truth is - it's the best we could find. And there's something else: They (the entire team) seem to have such a customer service orientation that they LISTEN! And they aren't afraid to admit that something needs to change. For example, see above when I mentioned the problem with state abbreviations. After I submitted the idea into the idea portal and copied the customer support email, they wrote me back a personal email and admitted that they should have caught this earlier. The fast-tracked the fix and -- I'm serious - they rolled out the fix within like... maybe three weeks max. (As fast as we would have wanted them to make a fix, test it, and releast it.) In fact, they've listened every time - and they've begun implementing changes based on sincere user feedback. Last week (I'm not making this up), they arranged a call with the [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] and the [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN]-- both on a Zoom call with the customer support specialist that they assigned to us. Their main purpose seemed singlefold: To listen. They never became defensive... not once. They basically said, "Make a list of your 'pain points,' and give ALL of them to us." No software vendor had EVER done that for me before (even though I've been equally forthright with ALL of them). The pricing is fair for what we get. Imagine - we sent out 9800 emails. Keela did GREAT. There's so much more I could say. Love it.

Pluspunten:

Keela's pricing structure was straightforward and fair. They didn't charge "by the user," like some vendors do. Yes, there's a sliding scale based on the range of contacts, but for our org, the scale seemed fair. We had tried numerous (I forget how many) products previously. I'm ashamed to admit we rarely stayed with one product longer than a year. DonorPerfect. CiviCRM. Salesforce. Blackbaud. Bloomerang. Salsa CRM/Engage. The list goes on. Not sure why - but when we found Keela (I'm not kidding), it was like finding "the one." For one thing, they didn't make me make an appointment with some sales rep that would do a 30-minute demo, then ask me if I had questions, even though I had already watched everything in her/his demo in dozens of YouTube reviews. (That's a crazy system, if you stop and think about it.) Keela let me open the account, set everything up, do my first imports, and start using the program all without having to wait on ANYONE in ANY time zone. (It's not that I'm anti-social. I just wanted to experiment with it on my OWN.) They advertised some outlandish increase we should expect in fundraising. I remember thinking, "Now how could they know that?" But I'm serious - from the day we first installed until the first email campaign, it was under 90 days. And our first email/printed mail campaign has just topped (you're going to think the company hired me to say this - but they didn't) $100,000 in income. Our typical email campaigns had been $10,000 or $12,000prior

Minpunten:

I need a bigger box. (haha) I didn't like the way they seemed to want to hide certain fields from me - like, they were afraid it would make the software seem too complex. The reporting module seemed sooooo basic. I just wanted them to give me a "field picker" for every field and let me choose exactly which fields I wanted. Instead, someone in their product development team had apparently decided which fields that he or she thought were important enough to include in a report. What's so hard about giving us a dropdown box with choices -- ALL choices?! States and Canadian provinces were listed in a dropdown - but I had imported thousands of records with state abbreviations -- and, strangely, it wasn't an option to search for those. (?????) Again, it was like they were trying to make the program so friendly that they prevented us from graduating to more of a "power user" posture. The software was fast (I mean - we have 17,000 contacts and it seemingly always finds the desired contact within 1 second - seriously), but some of the clicks and steps between functions are dreadfully filled with twists and turns and dead ends. Too many clicks. They allow the user to manage importing - and they have documented it well - but I can't designate a "key field" that I want to use as the key. They have their own Keela index - but it's hard to assign multiple keys. They DO keep an "external index" and they use it - but sometimes I'm not clear how to mesh the two.

Great team, great product

Opmerkingen: Overall our experience has been top-notch!

Pluspunten:

Easy integration with multiple other tools related to email, events and accounting. We were very happy with the ability to upload our previously accumulated data through the import tools. Self Help documents are thorough and the Support team are responsive, clear and concise.

Minpunten:

Soft credits and ability to report on both the initiator and the final delivery vehicle would be super helpful. Minor- but an ability to track any premiums distributed through some form of inventory capture would be great.

Keela rejects credit card payments for fund raising events/donations needed for operations, contacts messy

Opmerkingen: Extremely poor, there is no way to get timely human help. The program is not intuitive, contacts can't be cleaned up easily if there are duplicates (name of contacts are connected with company, company has a separate listing, deceased contacts can't be deleted, etc). By the time someone at Keela responds via messaging, our events are over and we've lost critical donors and contacts are frustrated. Bad for our brand of reliable legal service for the poor Looking again for better program like donor perfect maybe

Pluspunten:

Our [sensitive content hidden] liked the clean look of the interface, but beyond that, as the [sensitive content hidden], I have no pro and keeping the program is no sustainable because it glitches with credit card payments, usually in the clutch of a big fundraiser. I've had it with this program.

Minpunten:

example: right now we're screwed by Keela. It stopped taking credit card payments in the middle of our fundraiser event. Totally unreliable credit card acceptance, Fundraising events need reliable links for donors, forms need to work without frustrating donors by rejecting all credit card payments. Our own tests of credit cards doesn't work. The form will work for awhile, and then we lose critical time and labor with all the calls that the link won't accept credit card numbers and we have to manually take payments. Its unsustainable.

Keela to supports my nonprofit needs!

Pluspunten:

I am so happy to have found Keela to supports my nonprofit needs! At first, I was impressed with the sales team and the product presented to me. The team took the time necessary to help me understand the product. They were not pushy and answered all my questions. They are more affordable than competitors with similar functionality. The software is super easy to use. It looks great. The functionality is excellent and is getting better each day. I really love the software. The best thing about Keela is their ongoing customer support. They are prompt when I request help. They answer the questions I ask specifically. They are really lovely! I am on a first-name basis with one of them. Ha. I recommend this software. It has been excellent for our nonprofit. We are a public policy nonprofit.

Minpunten:

I do not use the dashboard so much and it's not that customizable.

Review for small charity with staff of one looking to grow our capacity

Opmerkingen: Overall Keela is excellent and I love using it. More than that, I love the Keela brand and what the company stands for. There's a warmth and personal approach that helps me feel confident that the Keela team are in my corner. Since I'm the only staff member for my charity, I can't overstate the importance of feeling like Keela are an extended part of my charity team - you help me feel supported and less alone. Thank you!
(Also love the annual capacity conference - please keep it coming!!)

Pluspunten:

The price point is REALLY amazing for very small, young charities. For the functionality, Keela offers huge bang for our buck. My charity Board love that Keela are specifically aiming to help small charities like our grow our capacity. Switching to Keela has allowed me (the ED and sole staff member) to streamline our work flows and automate a bunch of things (like tax receipts and donor thank yous!) that were taking up a lot of my time.

Minpunten:

One thing that bugs me a lot is when someone uses the contact form that is embedded into our website I seem to need to click through several layers in Keela to actually get to their message (notifications > contact > interactions > contact form > message). It'd be amazing if somehow those messages were easier to access - it took me a few goes to figure out that I need to look up "interactions" for a contact, and not "emails".

Small Nonprofit Review

Opmerkingen: Prior to Keela, we were using multiple tools for CRM, donations, and communication. Keela has simplified this and has made my job much easier.

Pluspunten:

The intuitiveness and ease of use, along with the broad versatility, are the main aspects that I like the most. It has made our CRM tasks so much easier to perform and track.

Minpunten:

I don't really have any complaints. There are a couple more features I'd like to eventually see (like mobile access or some smoother integrations.)

A Quick, Low-ish Cost Solution for a Non-profit that lacked structure

Opmerkingen: Overall this software has (or will be) a lifesaver. Our staff have had difficulties adjusting to the new system, mainly because there is structure and specific data points where before it was a mish mash of data in notebooks, Excel files, and Post-It notes. I would like to see some additional development devoted specifically to customization of the system. Keela is very much a rigid cloud solution with little to no customization options. Having the ability to control the look and feel of the system, donor-facing data, and being able to control what inputs are allowed from users would be a huge help. At the end of the day, though, Keela is a great solution for a small nonprofit who is looking for a quick solution at low cost.

Pluspunten:

-Easy to onboard donors and volunteers (the difficult part was organizing the data to make it upload properly which has more to do with the administration of the organization that the software. -Immediate, flexible training for the staff. -Relatively simple interface. I say relatively because sometimes its almost "too" easy and some members of the staff overlook the simple solution.

Minpunten:

-I am not fond of the analytics tool. Again, maybe this has more to do with the fact that its too simple, but as an analyst I find it difficult to get the information I want easily. -We have had some struggles with the integration with other vendors-specifically MailChimp. After following all the instructions for both companies, we still cannot complete a good link.

Review of Keela as an admin and user

Pluspunten:

I like that it has features we can use on a daily basis all in one system.

Minpunten:

Any new product enhancement isn't automatically added to your subscription. Often has to pay additional fee.

Lovely locally program!

Opmerkingen: We think it is pretty great!

Pluspunten:

This is more than a CRM for us! This software created inspiration for building a journey for our donors and sponsors. It provides us with numbers at our finger tips and knowledge is power.

Minpunten:

There are some functions that are lacking intuitive UX for our team.

Great solution

Opmerkingen: Tracking contacts and donations and hopefully will expand more for e-blasts.

Pluspunten:

Easy to use and very user friendly. Screens are managed and viewed easily. Easy to enter and log information (like contacts, donations and so on)

Minpunten:

Support (although very professional) only by email. Would prefer a phone support.

Great software for the price

Pluspunten:

We love the Communications tools offered and the ease in which we can add forms to our website for registrations and donations.

Minpunten:

There is an issue with being able to link a business with the person connected to the business and being able to search by the person's name.

Fantastic product for NPO's

Opmerkingen: We're happy to finally have a cloud-based database where many of our team members can access important information and we can all work together to perform tasks. Working with Keela has been a positive experience from the beginning and we especially appreciate that they consider feedback and are constantly improving and making updates.

Pluspunten:

Keela has become our one-stop-shop for donor, member, e-mail management, etc. and has streamlined our processes immensely. The integration and import of all of our current data was seamless and quick and if we ever ran into any issues, customer service was very helpful. Keela is very easy to use and learn, which made training our very busy staff and volunteers very easy.

Minpunten:

Our organization has some pretty specific needs, and not every feature from our previous donor/member database was able to be customized in Keela. However, we were able to find some work-arounds and the pros of using Keela vastly outweigh the cons.

Keela

Opmerkingen: About the only benefit I have seen so far is that it is an online portal that is easy to put in information and to download contact lists. All of the other functionality that is available is there--we just don't know how to use it. We are still not even accepting payments via PayPal, even though we synched the accounts. Our marketing director needs some hands-on assistance with merging the forms to our website.

Pluspunten:

The set up was not as complicated as I thought it would be, and the navigation is well laid out and easy to follow.

Minpunten:

I don't think we received enough human training with on-boarding, and it would have been nice to have more one access to a human as the "prompted" help answers are often inaccurate and not helpful. Our sales agent was fantastic and very knowledgeable, but once we purchased I felt as we were kind of left to our own devices. Now I am not even sure that we set it up the best way. 1. We hae to enter memberships as donations and as memberships 2. The "tags" remain even if a membership expires. 3. We still aren't sure that when we are pulling reports that the information is being put in correctly to access what we need as as information. 4. We were not aware that in order to sync membership payments automatically, we have to use Skype. 5. We should be much much further along in using the different amenities of the site, but so far we are just kind of stuck. We need assistance.

Game changer for our non profit

Opmerkingen: We now have way better data management. We had a really clunky membership program before Keela, and now people can easily become members and set up an auto-renewal for their membership, which is a game changer for us. We are finding over 70% of members are opting for auto renewal, which is saving us a stack of time sending follow up emails that are being lost.

Pluspunten:

We are a small non profit and we were managing all our relationships and donors on spreadsheets. We knew we needed to take the leap to a CRM, but we were hesitant to invest the money. Over 6 months we trialled all the main non profit CRMs, and Keela came out head and shoulders above the rest. Although it is an additional expense, we easily earn that back in increased donations and recurring donations set up through Keela. There are many features of Keela we don't use, but if you had a sophisticated fundraising team they would be great.

Minpunten:

Some features are not as customizable as I would like, for example, you can't have a pay what you want/custom membership amount, which was a core component of our membership program.

A Growing Platform

Pluspunten:

Keela is a very user-friendly platform. Everything within the system is easy to understand, to learn, and to navigate around. They provide video and text tutorials for every feature, which makes learning them a breeze. I also enjoy the simple but clear navigation around the platform, and find it very intuitive to find exactly what I'm looking for.

Minpunten:

Our organisation has been using Keela since its early launch in Canada and, like any new system, we've found there have been some growing pains. I'd say overall that every feature Keela offers is easy to use and functional, I've also quickly run into constraints with things that I would love to be able to do within Keela. For example, the forms work perfectly when using Keela's existing templates, but it's either difficult or impossible to create a form outside of the templates. In addition, sometimes new features have a lot of promise but then are quite clunky to work within. For example, my organisation was very excited for the release of peer-to-peer fundraising, but then found the P2P platform very challenging to use for our potential donors. I'm sure all these things will get smoothed out over time, and overall I still very much enjoy using the Keela tools and platform.

Not a CRM software package

Opmerkingen: We had thought to replace our CRM software with Keela, but trying to 'translate' the processes in place with Software ABC into Keela has not been totally successful. It may be that I am too used to the 'old ways' that I can't change. We originally bought Keela because of the receipt function and the hopes that we could replace our other CRM software. Changeover has been slow and we are really only using the receipt function in Keela right now.

Pluspunten:

Keela integrates very easily with most other apps I am using . Paypal and Stripe are easy to set up; connects to Eventbrite too. Adding contacts is super easy, plain language categories and descriptions. Easy to connect contacts into groups (they call them 'families'). The software is geared towards use by a single point NFP agency. Can generate receipts for all monies that come in, assign them to a campaign or purpose, email the receipts and store them for retrieval, if necessary. Keela has always been on top of customer service questions. I have received prompt replies to every question I have made and the answers were always easy to understand and implement. Keela also regularly hosts online training sessions, and strives to improve their product to meet the needs of their users. Recent upgrades included a way to create a report of revenues received/receipted. that was a BIG help.

Minpunten:

As a software package created for single point NFP, it does not like that I work for an agency that provides services to other NFP organizations for an annual fee. I can't group the contacts into one organization and then make the organization the one that pays the annual fee (it needs to be attributed to a contact).

Customize Keela to suit your needs!

Opmerkingen: Keela has a fantastic team that is very supportive and willing to work with you - right from the initial meeting we had with the sales team, through integration and uploading all our data, to support as glitches were found... the Keela team is there for us!

Pluspunten:

The ability to customize the program to do what we needed it to do. The main purpose is to send emails to our various stakeholders, ensuring the correct people get the correct messages and emails. Keela definitely lets us do this!

Minpunten:

It is a big expense for us! We continually monitor our numbers to stay within the contact limit allowed by our current level. The jump to the next level is outside of our budget so we need to ensure we don't go over.

Pros and Cons of Keela

Opmerkingen: This program is great. I'm only 6 months into this program. I would reccomend this to others. But it will take time to learn how to run it properly. I am still learning.

Pluspunten:

Its easy to enter the contacts. Once you set up an e-blast, its easy to choose the recipients. Once you learn to create the e-blast letter, it looks great.

Minpunten:

It can be difficult to log in. It will redirect me from log-in to setting up a new account. It can be challenging to learn how to work the e-blast letters and setting up the campaign. Its difficult to get answers quickly. It takes a while to reach someone, and it usually is only email communication. It can be difficult to create the email body for e-blasts.

Best Nonprofit CRM out there!

Opmerkingen: Keela is the best do-it-all CRM for any nonprofit!

Pluspunten:

Keela has everything in one place for nonprofit contact/database/fundraising management. They also have the best customer service in the industry. One of the items that really sets them apart is their monthly webinars to help you learn more! They help you learn about their systems but also provide valuable industry content as well!

Minpunten:

There are things that I wish Keela did that it currently doesn't. However, Keela is very receptive to new ideas and takes customers' insights into consideration when upgrading things.

Good value for the money!

Opmerkingen: We made the switch from an overpriced, under-utilized database software to Keela. The switch pretty smooth, not without a few learning moments, but all the data was imported. It meets our needs for receiving and tracking donations, receipting, e-blasts, reporting, and it comes with an affordable price tag! Customer support has been great. Overall, we are very happy with the software after using it for 6+months.

Pluspunten:

The software is straightforward, fairly intuitive and does most of what we need it to do. The setup for donations through the software was simple. The email platform saves us from having to pay for a separate email service. Most of all, I appreciate the helpful customer support. They answer questions in a timely fashion and have made the overall experience really good!

Minpunten:

The sidebar is limited and should include a quicker link to things like donations, e-blast, etc. In order to use the CRM platform, I have to click through 3 pages to put in a note about a donor. Adding some quicker links for this, including putting an interaction link on the "+" at the top of the page would up my rating of the software.

Highly Recommended

Opmerkingen: Excellent donation and contact management tool. Tech support and learning tools are superb.

Pluspunten:

How donation requests can be automatically matched to donors based on their giving history.

Minpunten:

As a non-profit, I wish there was a way to track grant success and history.

Looks great, doesn't function well

Opmerkingen: It looked nice but a huge disappointment.

Pluspunten:

It looks beautiful and clean. Vibrant colors.

Minpunten:

Very challenging to create reports. Our organization gets grants and reporting is a huge aspect of our monthly financials. Keela did not have a clean reporting. Very disappointing.