Top Rated Bonterra Donor Engagement Alternatives
The system is very basic which made it easy to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Our experience with Bonterra/Network for Good has been incredibly frustrating and damaging to our organization. Since the start of the year, we’ve faced several issues that seriously impacted our ability to operate smoothly. Despite our efforts to fix things, we didn’t receive the level of service or support we expected.
The biggest problem we had was losing years of important donation records, including hundreds of thousands of dollars from one of our biggest donors. This happened because a support member misunderstood a simple request to remove duplicates, and instead, they deleted all of our data. This was devastating and could have easily been avoided with better communication and more careful handling of our data.
What made things worse was the lack of accountability from Bonterra. We reached out multiple times, starting in June, to try to resolve this, but we barely received any communication back. By the time they did respond—two months after our subscription renewed—it was far too late to fix the damage. Their unresponsiveness left us scrambling to figure out what had happened and how to recover.
When they finally did get back to us, it wasn’t helpful. Bonterra was unwilling to be flexible with our contract, even though we were actively trying to switch to a different platform. Then, without much warning, they cut off our access to the system, forcing us to scramble to retrieve the remaining data we needed to migrate.
For nonprofits that depend on accurate donor records and reliable data, this has been a nightmare. Bonterra/Network for Good didn’t take responsibility, offered no real solutions, and ultimately left us feeling abandoned at a critical time.
If you’re considering Bonterra/Network for Good, I strongly suggest you look at other platforms. Our experience has been a painful lesson in poor communication, lack of support, and lost trust. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
682 out of 683 Total Reviews for Bonterra Donor Engagement
Overall Review Sentiment for Bonterra Donor Engagement
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The platform offers all the elements needed for donor management, including a variety of communication platforms, and for fundraising efforts, such as event ticketing and silent auctions. We've used it all and couldn't be happier with the ease and functionality. Three of our staff use the platform every day, and we are very pleased with customer support. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Being charged for records with zero dollar donations. We have many subscribers, such as local media, who are not donors, but who receive our monthly digital newsletter; each of those non-revenue generating records increase the price of our Bonterra subscription. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The most helpful thing about every action has to be the organization of the platform and the cohesiveness of the tools. I love how there's so much to do within every action. A great deal of my work is on this platform because it is so useful. I send all of our emails out through every action and they make it very easy to segment and create lists from the contacts. Theonline actions side is also veyr helpful and it's nice to be able to store so many form becaus ethere are times when we go back t older campaigns for information. We run all of our ticketed event forms using online actions and our general donation form that we have embedded on our website. In addition, I love the upgrades that were made to the utomation emails, as a result sending out a happy birthday email to our email list was very easy. The other thing I enjoy is the easy integration with other platforms such as mobilize. It makes data storage so much more helpful, especially as someone who isnt as savvy on the data side of technology. Whenever I need help with something, the support team responds quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The least helpful thing is not having that many options to change up the design for our forms whether it be ticketed events, volunteer forms, petitions, etc. It'd be nice to have more design elements we can add such as baclground color, more options for image placement etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Our small nonprofit was struggling to manage our donors, donations and engagement trying to cobble together a web of support with various options. We moved to Network for Good to consolidate our information and tactics for optimum reach and engagement. Having all of the information in one place (contact info, giving info, interactions, click rate, etc) has been immensely helpful to our small staff wearing many, many hats. Organized groups allow us to target communications and not send massive scattershot emails. We haven't had many issues but the minor things that have come up have been handled quickly and easily with customer support. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
One of our biggest cons is the price tag. We are a small nonprofit and every penny spent needs to be for a good reason. It was an expensive decision for us but we have appreciated all the tools and benefits. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Everything is right there in Bonterra - donation tracking, text/mass email creation, personalized campaigns, etc. Everything to keep a lot of the non-profit administrative stuff organized. Very self-intuitive as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Sometimes donors will donate to a campaign that expired over a year ago and even if you set a final date for donations, the campaign doesn't "close." Its no problem to edit the donation to the intended campaign, but then it brings the expired campaign back up to the top of the list.
Also, it's difficult to add a new name to mass mailings. Sometimes you may want to personalize a mass email to a certain group of donors from a board member or other person, and it's difficult to add that additional name. So all of the mass emails have to come from the same staff member in the organization. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I like how, even within the templates, almost any feature can be customized. I also appreciate the analytics to help us make informed decisions about future fundraising efforts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Integrating the graphics can sometimes be tricky. I can create a graphic that I feel is perfect, but when loaded into Bonterra, it doesn't seem to look as I expected, which means I need to keep going back to tweak my graphics to fit with the program. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What I love about Bonterra is the intuitive software for Donor Management. There are so many tools available from creating correspondence to easily stay in touch with donors to donor data to keep Board Members and Finance Teams up to date with current and year over year data. We also like that almost everything is included in the initial package. They also have a dedicated team to help you move your donor data to their system. Whether it's an excel spreadsheet or another system, their customer team is there to help! They also coach you through how to use the software and are quick to respond to customer questions. There are some fundraising tools not included, but those can be bundled in. It's a great product. We love it and use it daily! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I don't know that there is a downside. There are plenty of features, overall it's easy to use. There are some features in writing thank you letters or correspondence that I am still not proficient at, but I'm getting there. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The best feature of BGF is its excellent support team. Support team responses are very detailed and the response time is quick. The BGF platform is very user-friendly, making it easy for even our older users who help us pull data or make notes on donor profiles. The simplicity of the platform makes it easy to navigate and find exactly what you are looking for. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The only downside of BGF is the lack of past donor status. For example, we are unable to generate a report or filter out monthly donors who have stopped giving in the last month. Although BFG offers a variety of filters to extract information about donors, it would be great if we were to view trends of giving in terms of donor status. Lastly, it would be great to have a bit more flexibility in how we can label donors as lapsed In many cases, especially for my organization a lapsed donor is someone who has not given in two years due to the nature of our size. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Industry-specific CRM (for non-profits, political campaigns, etc.) with a decently intuituve UI. This is the primary fundraising CRM for my NPO (450k records, 75k transactions per year), and is used daily by about 15 users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
There are limitations in available integrations (choices of payment processor, fundraising event modules, volunteer management systems, etc),
The occasional roll-out of new features has a tendency to introduce small bugs, end-users are essentially beta-testers.
While there is a high degree of cusomtizability in creating user permission profiles, the options are critically lacking in some important disctinctions, such as "create" and "edit" functions assignable for some fields only as both or none for some fields.
There are some limitations on what objects are queryable or surfaceable in user-generated reporting. For example, audit trails on objects are visible, but not able to be queried or compiled in reports.
Customer Support from Bonterra staff has been lacking as of Q3-Q4 of 2023 - prior to this period I would have strongly recommended this . Tickets that I have submitted have been claimed and solutions promised but never delivered, and getting developers to follow up on support requests has been increasingly difficult. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The CRM/Database software is extremely user-friendly. Great design and great features. The customer support has been excellent as well. For a small to mid-sized nonprofit organization, Bonterra is the best product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I would like Bonterra to add additional stanfard fundraising measurements to the dashboard. We would like to have quick reports that measure the three (3) donor types: Retained, New and Re-activated. ALL donors fall into one of these three categories. Currently I have to to run two filter reports to calculate retained and new donors. The only way that to get the reactivated donor total is by subtracting the new and retained from the total. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
My favorite feature about Bonterra are the video thank yous. Donors absolutely love them and it's a great way to personalize your thank you message and it's very memorable. I don't know of any other DMS that does video thank yous. They are super easy to use and very user friendly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
I wish you could customize the event and ticket pages more. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
