Bloomerang

Opmerkingen: We are a small shop and need to be able to minimize the time we spend managing the data side of the house so that we can be out meeting with our donors and focusing on donor acquisition. I feel like Bloomerang allows us to manage our data in a user friendly, functional way so that we can focus our time on raising money. My background is major gifts and I have limited technical skills with database management, but Bloomerang is so user friendly that I am able to pull reports, produce lists, upload data, process gifts and acknowledge gifts with ease so that I can focus on utilizing the MOVES management aspects of the database to move our donors through our donor pipeline.

Pluspunten: I'm a development professional and my background is high level database work. In my new role I'm having to delve deeper into database management and I'm so happy we have Bloomerang. For the most part I can navigate and produce what I need on my own. However, when I get stuck the customer service of Bloomerang is beyond measure. They are always so friendly and kind, they listen to what I'm trying to do and understand my needs. They help walk me through how to do what I am trying to do, so I learn how to do it on my own moving forward. I honestly can't say enough about their customer support. They also have great (and very relevant) webinars.

Minpunten: The thing I struggle with the most is the usability of the letters and email functions. Formatting is tricky and there seems to be limitations to being able to move images around etc. It always ends up taking me longer to produce a letter or email than I anticipate because I have to play around with the formatting so much. This is the one part of the software that doesn't feel as user friendly.

Pluspunten: Bloomerang is a breeze to navigate and search, with a detailed (but not overwhelming) summary view of each constituent, organization, and household in the database. When someone asks, "Who is this person?" I can tell them their top-line donation history, how we met, their capacity to give more, and who they're connected to, in less than a minute and with no effort at all. I can't overstate how intuitive and easy it is to get around, which is always helpful when training new users. After you build a few letter templates, gift processing and drafting acknowledgement letters become a joy. Integrations with Twitter, DonorSearch, and TrueGivers help us know more about our prospects and donors, and keep our address records up to date, automatically. But what I truly like most about Bloomerang is their support. They offer weekly training webinars not only about how to use the platform better, but also about topics in the larger nonprofit field. They offer a whole vault of resources for nonprofit organizations at any stage of growth. Every interaction I've had with their support staff -- by email, phone, live chat -- has been as thorough and helpful as I need it to be. Their "Features Portal" is always seeking feedback on what they could improve, and they're incredibly transparent about what they're working on next and when we might expect an update. In the year since we migrated to Bloomerang, it's been more than clear that they take this feedback loop seriously and listen well.

Minpunten: Bloomerang is easy to use -- at the cost of being fully customizable. I am not a programmer, so this exchange works out mostly great for me and my team, but I can imagine a programmer growing frustrated by the constraints in place to keep the platform easy to use. Take one example: you can add multiple addresses (email or physical) for each constituent, but there is no "note" field for each address. What if three email addresses go to the constituent's various assistants, and only one goes straight to the constituent? What if you mark an address "bad," but now need a place to say why? We've had to add custom fields (super easy to do, by the way) for "Additional Contact Information" so we can track these details, but those custom fields get buried at the bottom of a constituent's profile -- after the default profile information -- and there's no way to reorder the profile so that custom content appears more intuitively for how our organization uses the database. We've had to build in a few clumsy workarounds like this to solve problems that have a more straightforward solution, but those straightforward solutions then become suggestions in the features portal, to be solved if and when Bloomerang decides to. The reporting is a powerful tool, but the filter logic is unusual and has a few pitfalls ("raised" versus "revenue," for example) and a few hidden powers to know about ("has" and nested filters). Definitely take the time to dive deep into reporting resources.