DonorView Software

DonorView - The all in one software for non-profit organizations

We work in the non-profit youth ministry sector and have locations across 8 different states. After maintaining a software that we created many years ago, we made a decision to get out of the software business and outsource all software to allow us to focus more on our mission as opposed to software management. All this being said, we spent a few years researching different software companies all to find that we were unable to find a company to fit all of our needs in one place. After visiting with a lot of the large and leading software companies in this industry, we came across DonorView which gave us the opportunity to find a company that had the different pieces of software we were looking for that was all under one roof like donor tracking/management, tracking leader to student interactions, event registration, email communication and much more.

Pros

The best part about DonorView for our organization is that it fills our need of being an all-in-one software that allows us to do donor tracking/processing/management, event registration, email communication, student and volunteer tracking, and much more.

Cons

The thing we like least about DonorView is that it is taking us a little while to get used to a new system and we have found things along the way that needed slight adjustments to make them work for our specific needs. Though this has been a small hurdle for our organization, DonorView has been very helpful in providing continued training and has been very willing to work with us to make the software work for us.

Donorview for small history sites

Great customer service and experience thus far.

Pros

That it is intuitive with membership and donation functions.

Cons

Not able to attach images and documents like a regular email in email campaigns. But this is still functional.

Jack of all trades master of none.

Pros

The number​ of functions available for use.

Cons

Buggy interface, not user-friendly especially the email marketing piece. Lacks the nuance to make it a pleasing process.

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.

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.

Great tool for donor management

So far my experience has been good, although I ultimately decided to use another software long term.

Pros

Easy to track donor contact information, giving history, reporting, and other valuable data

Cons

It took me some time to understand how to use the software and I've had some technical issues with it, but nothing that technical support could not handle

Easy transition to DonorView. Great customer support.

Easy to track donations and constituents. Transition was easy.

Pros

Easy to use. DonorView already has incorporated the items a non-profit is looking for in its software. Great on-line videos on how to use the program.

Cons

Still learning how to use event management and tracking. Does not have a way for user to import data.

I have no idea how we'd be doing this without DonorView.

It's a single repository for everything. Spreadsheets and e-mail are no longer acceptable when a tool like this is available.

Pros

DonorView is a single repository for everything. Spreadsheets and e-mail are no longer acceptable when a tool like this is available.

Cons

The e-mail newsletter functionality is a little querky. The resulting messages appear very different with different browsers.

We love DonorView. The customer support is phenomenal and we were able to combine 5 different progra

Pros

It is great that we are able to customize all of our reports and we also love the amount of detail we can add to our constituent profiles. I would definitely recommend this product.

Cons

I would like to be able to pull cumulative giving in a report. Their email customization can be very glitchy.

Just switched and am enjoying an easier and more integrated system.

I got a more comprehensive system for equal or less money. Got more stuff than I had with my old system, such as the donor pages, and the donor portal. It is much more visually pleasing and can manage grants much better.

Pros

Reporting is easier, visuals are nicer, grant management is great. Excited to use the peer to peer system. Its very comprehensive and you don't have to pay extra to add all the components.

Cons

The only thing I don't like is that you can't upload a template to be mail merged. Maybe they'll fix that soon!

A Stand Out Among the Many

Pros

Easy to use. Help resources available in text and videos. Support team responds immediately. Never feel unsupported. Features suit non-profits and they implement new ones to meet the needs of such entities, such as the new Silent Auction app.

Cons

Wish it worked with Safari/Mac better. Unable to delete more than one constituent record at a time, but support was willing to assist.

Donor View has been extremely beneficial for our non-profit organization.

This software has allowed our organization to pull several different processes (Mail Chimp, Event Brite, Pay Pal, Stripe, Access database, Excel spreadsheets, etc.) into just one program. It is saving us time, which in turn saves us money. It is helping us be more efficient, which leads to more productivity.

Pros

Ease of use. Donor View implementation team has been very helpful and made the transition process easy.

Cons

Automatic billing. We would prefer to receive an electronic invoice, review it, contact the company with any discrepancies, and then pay as we wish.

DonorView Customer service was excellent. They were prompt with answering questions and e-mails.

We are only now getting started on this software but I envision being able to have a better picture of our big donors verses small donors and using this for sponsorships and to build better and more relationships overall with our donor base. We are excited about the peer to peer sharing for donations/sponsorships as well.

Pros

The customer service that came with this software was great. Being a nonprofit without a great deal of Tech training we found this software to be user friendly and easy to navigate.

Cons

Trying to get all of our data to fit under the amount needed for the lesser cost. We had 9 years worth of donor information and a tight budget so we only converted over 4 years worth to keep our records under the specific criteria in cost.

Given time it is easy to very the hang of the software and can be worth the money.

Pros

The customer service is very good. They respond very quickly. All the services that they provide are also nice.

Cons

Some of the features are hard to figure out how to use like when building the mail merge templates or email templates.

Broad, dynamic system, excellent / responsive customer support.

Pros

It allows me to capture a great deal of information about our clients and package it in a variety of different ways. Has a breadth of services so provides a more one stop shop from integrating with our website to receive payments, customer tracking, email campaigns and analysis.

Cons

Isn't easy to track some date specific events (partner renewal dates). To be honest, many of my issues have been answered or are on the radar of the development team.

I find the functions of Donorview an excellent choice for our 501c3. It

Pros

It has made donation recording and reporting so easy. I can manage our database easily and it's made doing mail out's much simpler. I can track who is opening and reading, how many times. The software is multifunctional and I like having all those options in one place. The support team are always quick to respond to any questions I might have. I'm still working hard on making full use of all that Donorview has to offer us.

Cons

Some of the reports are not intuitive to run, I've had trouble getting out the reports that I wanted, also running out a mailing list. I know keep a master mailing list outside of donorview, and have to update that address list in two places. I've had some trouble building templates for marketing emails. I wish there were more variations on building blocks for emails.

Donorview is user friendly and their customer support team is always there to answer questions.

Pros

Easy to use, has all of the features and functions that I require in a donor database, customer service is exceptional.

Cons

The software does not offer an ACH functionality directly through their website. You are able to link up to a different website and tie the two together, but I would rather not pay an additional fee for the functionality.

Extremely easy to use, and great customer service from the folks at DonorView!

Pros

We transitioned from Excel spreadsheets to DonorView, and the support staff made the transition very easy and it's been extremely helpful having the ability to generate reports and build historical data.

Cons

There have been one or two technical glitches we've had, but the support staff has been extremely helpful.

Fantastic! Meets a variety of needs for an enitre nonprofit!

Having one database that performs the same functions as our previous three, it is extremely user friendly.

Pros

So far, myself and my organization has had a great experience with Donorview. The transition period was very simple from our old database since Donorview provided ample support and answered all of our questions and concerns over the transition while also merging our data very quickly. Whenever we have any questions or issues the support team quickly responds and helps resolve any issues. My team and I are always excited to see the new features and updates donorview creates as it is always bigger and better. Thank you to the donorview team for such an amazing diverse software!

Cons

The reporting is the part that we struggle the most with, it is not as robust as our old database so that has been a struggle in terms of acquiring donor retention reports with ease. I know that this will soon be an issue of the past as the software continues to develop.

Our experience with DonorView has been completely exceptional!

DonorView far surpasses our previous system for record keeping. In addition, it has allowed us to eliminate a variety of outside subscriptions because of its multi-faceted capabilities. Since implementing this software, we are more organized, which allows us to be more successful as an organization!

Pros

The database is extremely intuitive and user friendly which has made the process of transitioning that much easier. The staff at DonorView is amazing and provided immediate and thorough support for every question I threw their way. I will recommend to anyone I know!