Our overall experience with Donorview has been exceptional. Implementing the CRM as our first option and choice for a new office, we have not been disappointed. Brilliant product.

The user interface is really easy to navigate. The company support is excellent and all questions/training is dealt with in under 24 hours.

While there were initially some functionality missing, the Donorview team are constantly working in the background to improve their product. No cons currently.

We really like DonorView. We came from Giftworks and Paypal, and DonorView is incredible. The system is incredible smart and well thought out.

Donorview is extremely customizable. It is easy to input new constituents, and the fluidity in which the events, fundraising, and constituent modules interact is fantastic. We like that we can do survey's in the system itself and track responses. Reports are easy to pull. We also like that when we do encounter problems, customer support returns out email and helps out quickly during business hours. They have implemented features for us when we request and are happy to help in any way possible.

The biggest downside to DonorView is that support is only available during normal business hours. We do a lot of evening and weekend events, and support is not available then. I believe they do have a feature now where you can prearrange and pay to have someone available to assist in an emergency, but it is not standard. DonorView is also fabulous at implementing new feature requests, but they aren't great at telling you that they have done so! I have absolutely discovered by accident that something I requested was done.

I'm not looking to switch away from DonorView, simply because it's better than the patchwork of applications we were using and it's in our budget as a non-profit. I'm still holding out hope that DV will start putting some investment into seriously improving their product for the end user, especially for power users who are responsible for maintaining enterprise data. If they don't, I'm worried that the company will go belly up. But for now, I'm sticking with it despite how frustrating the system is to actually use in the real world.

The idea behind DonorView is great. You keep everything in one place to get a 360-degree view of your constituents and replace all the various individual systems for email, web forms, payments, events, donor tracking, CRM, etc. And you do it at an affordable price. All these features are, in fact, in the system, which is wonderful. It's in the execution things start breaking down.

When we signed on to DV over a year ago, I knew there were practical problems with the system but hoped they had an aggressive development team which would stay competitive by continually improving the product. By now, it's apparent that they do not have an aggressive development team and appear to be putting almost no effort into improving their product to stay competitive, which is frustrating for the user and makes us worried that the company may fail and leave us hanging. DV obviously doesn't use this system themselves, at least not in the full way it's intended to be used, or I'm sure the more glaring problems would have been solved by now. There is no power-user interface. You can only search for constituent records with a single string across all fields, for example, rather than being able to search for combinations of field values with wildcards. You lose your found set whenever you drill down — extremely frustrating. You cannot edit multiple records at once if you find a widespread problem (although DV will offer to write an ad hoc script for a fee). Constituents can create duplicate records without the system flagging that event for you. Couples with individual records can use a DV campaign page to donate as a couple, creating a third record, and there's no automated way to split that out to the pre-existing records. You can use a "Family" field to create households, but there's no way to tell the system that you want to mail to some of those households as a household (e.g. we have some donors who tell us they want a single mailer every time, yet they don't always donate, purchase, or volunteer as a couple, so there's no automated way to ensure that they get just one mailer — it has to be done manually every time). Also, the email "templates" are not templates, they're just saved emails. Actual templates would be so much easier to work with. DV has effectively locked down certain design choices by preventing override, which is a real pain when their choices are bad, such as a hard-to-read gray font — I had to go in and tinker with the code to stop the system from ignoring my commands to use a darker font. You can't create any conditional auto-completes (e.g. having all new constituent records within certain cities, ZIPs, and counties automatically fill in a Service Area field). The list goes on. In short, DV doesn't really pay attention to the needs of the actual user in the field and they don't seem at all focused on creating a superior product for the end user.

Excellent!

DonorView is very user-friendly, which for me was one of the main selling points. Before moving to DonorView, we used a donor management system that was clunky, convoluted, and overall just too big for an organization like ours. DonorView made life a lot easier - combining a way to organize constituents better, maintain e-communication, run reports for metrics, and seamlessly fit with the look and feel of our website to attract more donors. The support is also top notch - when we have a question or a problem, the DonorView team is very communicative and committed to finding a solution. If we need fields added to profiles, etc. DonorView is very accommodating.

This is likely due to my own shortcomings rather than a flaw with DonorView (I am not trained in web design, etc.) but I sometimes have trouble with the e-mail templates. Like I previously mentioned, anytime I have a question or issue, the team helps me fix it promptly.