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.

Finding the right tool at the right price

It was an easy to get Sales involved in several meetings as not all the players were available at the same time. The cutover was a breeze and they even went above and beyond our expectations when additional data needed to be transferred across networks. After 2 years, DonorView is still welcoming our input and looking to enhance their system. This product is easy and cost effective for us.

Pros

Customer Support. Some people think Customer Service occurs only when you purchase a product but actually it starts when the product is first introduced. How well the team responds to your questions and offer real solutions tells a lot. Are they willing to answer same questions over and over. Then as soon as the transfer of data occurs, how quick will they respond. DonorView is excellent in this area while meeting the needs of our business.

Cons

While there were a lot of options editing written communication, some options I was used to were not there. However, through their Customer Service and Support Team, those deficiencies were enhanced to meet our needs. Great job listening to customer.

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.

Everything Non-Profits Need in one location

Our experience has been amazing. The support that everyone at DV gives to their clients is amazing and 100000000% better than what we received with the other software we were using.

Pros

We had Raiser's Edge prior to moving to Donorview. One of the things we like most is the ability to pull reports within seconds and with ease. Raiser's Edge was too complicated when it came to reports. DonorView makes it so simple.

Cons

The thing we like least about the software is the membership feature, but that has nothing to do with how good or bad it is, we just haven't had a reason to use that aspect yet so can't really comment on it beyond that.

What an improvement!

We had become increasingly frustrated with out previous platform in terms of errors, poor customer service and increasing costs. We've experienced the exact opposite with DonorView. The ease of use, data integrity, excellent customer service, affordability and constant enhancement has helped to reinvigorate our fundraising and donor relations efforts.

Pros

This software was easy to implement and we feel good about how we were able to maintain data integrity in the process. Customer service is excellent--- prompt, accessible and collaborative problem solving. The database is easy to navigate and the DonorView team seems very open to suggestions for enhancements.

Cons

We had struggled a bit with the automated donor recognition letters, but a recent enhancement addressed this issue. We also had some feedback that the peer to peer fundraising pages were less intuitive than our last vendors pages, but, again, this has improved and we had greater success as the year progressed.