Bonterra Guided Fundraising (formerly Network for Good) Reviews & Product Details

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I especially like the campaign side of the software because it allows you to manage your events easily and effortlessly. I like the donor side because it keeps great data and you don't have to do anything. And it is so easy to manage. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As a small organization of only 4 and a half years in existence, i dislike the cost of the software. I would very much like to keep the system because it is more detailed and proficient than any other program i have used before but the cost is too much to fit into our budget to keep it on a monthly and permanent basis. I almost hate getting too acustomed to it and too familiar with it because i know that when my program comes to and end, i wont be able to keep it. It will consume too much of our monthly budget. If we had taken on a substanial number of new accounts and donors to compensate for it, I would consider keeping it. This is what i dislike about the software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Responses to questions are quick and the staff are extremely friendly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Navigation back and forth from fundraising pages and donor management. There's also a completely separate site for payment management. It would be helpful to put this all on one site. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.