We Love Donorview

I have loved it. The customer service has been great, they answer my emails immediately. And it has simplified my life treamendously.

Pros

The versatility, I shopped around for months looking for something that would be able to fit my unique fundraiser. Donorview, while not super flashy like some of the others...checked every single one of my boxes. It has P2P, ticket sales, silent auction, text campaigne....tons of different features!

Cons

I wish that we had paid more to get a full training up front. I'm positive that there are more features that I could have been using, but don't know of because I didn't have a formal training.

Donorview was a HUGE upgrade from many systems into just one!

Donorview has made some great modifications based on our suggestions and has worked with us to create affordable personal solution when we really needed it. They are super quick and response to helping probelm-solve and understand the system.

Pros

We moved our database from a FileMaker system which was customized for us but was OLD and was housed on a harddrive instead of the cloud. Additionally, we used an email software, event software, an application/forms software and paypal and NONE of the programs talked to one another. All updates to the database were manual and time consuming. When we moved to Donorview it was such a breath of fresh air to have access to our database anytime/anywhere. Additionally, its exceptionally helpful to have purchases, events and donations associated with client records. We do a lot of events and the event software works flawlessly almost every single time. We also have been able to get creative with the forms/surveys function and recreate documents like waivers and applications in that system. Again, extremely helpful to have applications associated with records instead of having to manually update. Overall, we are so grateful to have a software that does pretty much everything we need it to do. We also appreciate the pricepoint for the amount of functionality that we have. We are a small non-profit so it was a good mid-range product that was accessible to us.

Cons

Donorview has an incredible breadth of functionality that is hard to find all in one software. If you analyze any one of these features by itself (event ticketing, email marketing, surveys etc) there is a bit less functionality and is less user-friendly than if you paid for any of those items individuallyl on their own. (For example, our old ticketing software gave us a few more options and was a bit easier to set up) However, having all that functionality ALL in one place at an affordable price really makes up for those minor inconveniences. (Ex. Our old ticketing system did NOT talk to our database so we had to do waivers/tracking manually which was a real pain in the butt). Overall, it has been totally worth the switch. Also, Donorview seems to be very responsive to suggestions and ideas and as a young company seems to be trying to make constant improvements in their system based on feedback. I imagine that as feedback comes in user-friendlyness will just continue to improve!,

It's brought us up to date!

Overall we love DonorView and it has been an excellent addition to the functionality of our organization.

Pros

The ease of using DonorView has completely helped our organization. It offers everything we needed such as tracking donations, membership, embedding forms onto our website, events, and SO much more. DonorView customized our entire database to fit our organization needs. It's like we have our own personal system that no one else has with all of the custom features DonorView created for us. Whenever we need changes, they do whatever we need with no fees to do so. We are incredibly grateful for how accommodating their customer service is as well. They always get back to us with any questions or requests to make changes to our account. Typically in less that 24 hours. It's great having such a great team to rely on to make sure our organization functions well.

Cons

Initially getting the software there is a lot to learn with certain features. But, DonorView offers great help videos you can watch. If your questions aren't answered in the videos, their customer service is a great plan B and they always get back to you quickly.

Excellent CRM

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

A great concept but not ready for prime time

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.