Money saved, and a whole lot of hassle and time saved!

They provide great customer service; regardless of whether you are a small or large nonprofit. Their software is very well organized and user-friendly. Their documentation and training are excellent and again, very user-focused.

Mail merging to Microsoft Word is not flawless. Sometimes we get errors, and many times spaces that follow mail merged values are deleted, which has caused problems in our donor letters. Sumac can't find a solution, so I plan to mail merge only to tab delimited text files in the future, and use the Microsoft Word built in mail merging, which works better anyway.

We are a non-profit ministry and needed software that tracks donors/donations, accommodates product sales, tracks memberships and renewal dates, and handles event tracking. It is VERY CHALLENGING to find non-profit software for a mid sized organization that handles all of these functions. Sumac does all of this in addition to being a very affordable solution. Also, we needed rather extensive custom programming to handle some of our more specialized batch processing functions. Sumac did the custom programming for us. I think one of the most compelling reasons to use Sumac is their customer service and support. I have done business with a large number of software companies during my career and few if any have been as responsive to customer needs as Sumac.

If support is paramount, Sumac is a great choice. Sumac covers a broad scope of functions, including donations, memberships, sales and events. The software is very easy to use. Built in import functions are very user friendly and very complete. Transferring data into Sumac from another system is not difficult and the error checking before import is very good. Contact history is strong and allows drill downs into all the underlying documents. Contact records allow the addition of extra user-defined tabs and fields which is a great asset.

Inventory tracking functionality could be more robust. Mail merges currently allow links between contacts and one other view, such as donations, memberships, etc. It would be helpful if more than one additional view would be supported. Reports could be improved, but this problem is easily resolved with a good report writer that links with an ODBC driver.

We started using Sumac for organizing our data a couple of years ago. Before that we were swimming in excel sheets and having multiple users access the same information was problematic. We use Sumac for ticketing, memberships and donations. I like that we have one system that organizes these three aspects, as there is (as one would hope) quite a bit of overlap between those three actions. It is also useful for organizing mailing lists (either hard copy or email) and analyzing data. But most importantly for us, it's an affordable option. There are CRMs out there that are more robust but for a small non-profit we wouldn't be able to afford them. Sumac is a really cost-effective option to suit our needs.

Sumac has a lot of software updates. These updates don't fundamentally change the look or experience of using it, but the updates often require us restarting our server. The other aspect is, though they are working on this, is that the web integration is not as customizable as one might like. It's difficult to change the look or flow of it to go with our branding. Finally - there are just a lot of pop-ups for any application while using it (do you want to record this, do you want to save this, etc.) which seem unnecessary.

The best benefit is being able to maintain all information in one database. Many donor management systems do not allow for volunteers and clients. Also, I believe this software is flexible with many features, yet you can still use it with other software systems like Constant Contact, etc.

You are able to add categories and information you need for your organization. You are able to personalize the database. In addition, the reporting helps you to save time managing and sharing information with your nonprofit board and constituents.

The only con is you have to take the time to learn how to use it. Sumac has the ability to have so much information that you need to know how to utilize that information for you. Luckily, the Sumac tech team is always available to help you and they have great tutorial videos for all aspects.

That we were able to combine both our client management system and donor system into one where before it was two different softwares. Also the reporting in sumac is so much more advanced

That you can not upload actual scanned documents only a link to where the document is stored. This is disappointing as we now must continue to store hard copy files when we were hoping to eliminate them.