Funraise

The one you've been looking for

Commentaires : Funraise has become a tremendous support system upon which to build our marketing and fundraising efforts. Their teams are friendly and responsive, and they are constantly providing free knowledge and resources which help inform our efforts. The platform is constantly improving as well, with new releases regularly.

Avantages :

Funraise combines every tool a non-profit organization may need to be successful into one easy-to-use platform, at a reasonable price point. Being able to manage donation forms, email automation, peer-to-peer fundraising and donation data analytics in one place is a welcomed addition to our tool kit and is already paying dividends.

Inconvénients :

There's not much to dislike. It's very intuitive and easy to use, even right out of the box. An end-to-end SMS marketing approach would be a nice feature addition that would help enhance donor communication.

Great platform, lacking quality customer service.

Commentaires : I really enjoy their platform, but I think they need to invest in training their staff how to handle problems better.

Avantages :

The back end usability is easy and quick to learn. The widget to collect donation directly on our website has been wonderful. The campaign page features have been perfectly suited to our needs.

Inconvénients :

The customer service if there's a problem is dreadful. We had tens of thousands of fraudulent charges happening at one point and it took two weeks for them to enable the reCaptcha feature for us to put on our donation form and then another six weeks to remove the charges and donor profiles that were created from each of them. During all of that time they only let me know the state of where things were at if I reached out to them. Each time I was left with no timeline on when the problem would be resolved.

Things I wish I knew before signing up:

Commentaires : I wish we had gone with a different option. The sales pitch led me believe there were more options to customize the donor-facing communications (individual receipts, year-end receipts, But I think the biggest issue is that donor information is automatically overwritten if an existing donor makes a new online gift. There's no duplicate-checker, it will just overwrite the info you've entered or transferred, deleting previous addresses, allowing for typos, changing names, etc etc. It will make you not trust your data.

Avantages :

It is fairly easy to use, particularly if you do not have complex needs. Do you just need to store a few donors and their gifts? This might work for you. The online donation forms also look very nice.

Inconvénients :

There are a few things that just don't make sense and probably won't work for your org if you have slightly-more-complex needs. Or married donors. Or don't want your existing data overwritten willy-nilly: -->There's no option for co-donors and 'household' receipts don't include household members. To get around that, you can enter donors as FirstName John & Jane Last Name Doe, but if Jane makes an online gift with the associated email address, any existing info is overwritten and all gifts now only have that one donor's name associated. There's no logical way within Funraise to handle donors who request receipts for joint gifts--if you follow the Funraise rules, someone is left off the receipt, and if you don't follow their rules, your data can be overwritten and you'd have no idea. There's no nuance for gifts made by couples, couples having different last names, etc etc. -->There's also no way to check for duplicates--if all of the info is different except the email address, existing info is just overwritten by new online gifts. If all of the info is the same except the email address, a new record is created. It does not alert you if either of those things happen. -->You cannot customize the email that is generated by a donor to alert someone that a gift was made in their honor. It's not particularly friendly. -->Cumulative year end receipts can only be generated for the prior year--there's no way to adjust the dates or how the data is presented. (This was a big selling point for us--the ability to easily send a year-end summary to donors.) -->There are also small annoying things that make data-entry more time-consuming than it needs to be for gifts that are made outside of Funraise: you cannot type in the date that a gift was made, you have to scroll back through a calendar to click on a date. Not life or death, but if you're entering past gifts, you're clicking around a ton (vs just being able to type 07/29/24). -->You cannot delete donor records. You can merge them if you know there's a duplicate.

Funraise customer support is great

Avantages :

Ability to access donors & donation information

Inconvénients :

Fees for online transactions are too high when donors cover fees

review

Commentaires : It's great - being a small team and at times a 1 man team when it comes to the development side Funraise automates many tasks as well as helps keep us very organized.

Avantages :

It's very easy to use, and has all features under one roof: event, peer to peer, recurring donors, donation button, social media, texting, and I'm sure I'm even missing other features. The integrations to email marketing, company matching, and wealth screenings are also very simple and easy.

Inconvénients :

There are some limitations to bulk action items that could make management easier as well as some manual specific limitations to the text feature.