Almost 4 years ago, when I considered which contact/donor relations management software platforms I was going to use for the ministry, here are a few of the things I was looking for: 1. Expandability (Will the system grow with us as we need it to without paying for what we don't need?) 2. e-Commerce - Are the e-commerce functions user friendly? Are they secure? Does it have integrated merchant service capabilities and can it seamlessly integrate with the database/account management capabilities? 3. Can I easily segregate, query, and manage contacts/donors? Can I track all of our touches with our contacts/donors and view them in one place/interface? 4. Do the front-end functionality components make it easy for our contacts/supporters/donors/etc. to communicate and do business with us? 5. Can we easily integrate our CRM communication/outreach/events/etc. into our existing website, social media, and vice versa? I was pumped when I got a "Yes" answer to all of the questions above from the team at Z2 Systems about the NeonCRM. I have extensive experience with some of the larger CRM providers and their products. I can say that without a doubt, the NeonCRM system is as functional, robust, expandable, and overall as capable, right out of the box, as systems costing 10 to 20 times as much. Clients are not hit with additional charges for modules that should already be included in the overall package. With regards to customer service and the company's employees and management actually listening to the customer and making adjustments to the system in order to meet the needs of the customer, Z2 Systems blows everyone else away. Coupled with its available seamless and cost-effective merchant services account integration partners, NeonCRM is a great option for any size organization and budget.

Overall, Neon CRM is a great product for the cost. As a smaller nonprofit, most of our budget goes directly back into youth programs.

Neon CRM is a simple, straightforward tool. It's easy to use and there are a lot of resources and tools to help onboard new users. It's cost-effective for our nonprofit and enables us to track donors, volunteers, and donations in one place.

A feature that could be improved at our subscription level is the ability to automate workflows. As it is, we have to manually pull reports to see if donors need to be contacted, moved along the pipeline, etc. It would be a huge improvement if Neon CRM offered a budget friendly alternative that enabled us to set contact on a pipeline and receive reminders when it's time to move them along.

The software has a lot of really useful features, like email blasts and the reports are really customizable.

The software isn't terribly intuitive, especially with reporting, and the training videos on YouTube are hours long. I also could not find the answers I needed in the help section when trying to customize reports. I learned more from the user forums than the actual help feature of the software.

Overall, Neon CRM has greatly improved our ability to track and steward donors. Our fundraising endeavors have greatly benefited as have our events. And automating many of the processes like acknowledgments has freed up more time to work on further improvements. It's been a huge improvement over the excel spreadsheets we were using previously.

The constituent portal is what really stood out for me and made me choose Neon CRM over other options.

There are certainly some features that could be improved or added. I've found donation batching to be cumbersome. There is no sustaining membership option, where a recurring donation can be counted toward a membership. And the duplicate merging process is clunky.

Overall we are very happy to NeonCRM. My one and only concern is the customer support and account management seems to be lacking a bit. I get emails often regarding "changes" to our account that in face do not affect us because we are currently on a contract with NEON. With staff overturn you never know who your account manager is (I have worked with 5 account managers in a matter of 2 years. The software is great and we will continue to use it as we find that it is very helpful for what we are doing.

Coming from Blackbuad and Raiser's Edge, it was really important to find a software that was user friendly and easy to learn. NeonCRM is that software. You don't need a ton of training to navigate around the system and find what you are looking for.

Our hope was this software would be able to take the place of many of our others and put things in one place. Although it was able to do that for a majority we still hope to see an auction component to NeonCRM. This was one of the items that was discussed when we were looking at software and our rep mentioned Neon was working at an integration for this in the future and still waiting for it.

It's been fine and we would recommend to other orgs, But need to cancel now, please

Hello, We have used Neon for several years now, and when we had a larger team, it made sense. Though the onboarding and ease of use was never a feature I personally found robust, it was a useful platform to organize donor data and run reports.

It has always been difficult to understand the functions, the system is not very intuitive. also merging from other donation platforms and having to delete duplicates was time consuming.

I've had good support if and when I've needed it. The set up person was great. Like any platform, you learn it and get used to it and it's very helpful.

This software manages my contacts and communication just as I would expect it to. It's customizable for our needs, as well.

There are two frustrating things. First, when I want to send a mass email, I've been told that images (flyers) don't send well and it's true. That is virtually the only thing we send out so that does not make me happy. In other words, we had to keep our Constant Contact account. Secondly, searching by city should be MUCH easier. I've been taught two ways to do it but it entails way too many steps.

We were able to consolidate membership, event, fundraising, and accounting data with the assistance of Neon's centralized database. The fact that we can generate almost any report has greatly increased the value of this information in helping us achieve our aims and ambitions.

I enjoy making reports and filling out forms. Adapting an existing form to my requirements and developing a report to go along with it. It's incredible how many tools are available. Despite working with a CRM consultant, I can use various resources to find things out.

While the steps may not always be obvious, any questions you have can be answered by visiting the Help Center or chatting with a representative. Filtering reports requires some practice, but the power to make personalized reports more than makes up for it.

Neon makes tracking our donors and donations easy. I also love the custom forms we can make for different fundraisers.

Not a huge issue, but sometimes customer service can be slow, but ultimately they have always been able to fix my issues.

Neon CRM is very easy to use. They provide a great academy to walk you through their system which was a great help when I first started using it. I like that reports are easy to pull, I can quickly update donor information or add a donation, and I LOVE that I can send emails to our supporters right from Neon CRM.

There are a few small technical things I would change with the Email Campaigns, mostly related to how the emails appear when opened in Outlook. But, this is not enough of a problem for me to want to change the way I send emails.

the support team is always quick to respond and the company listens to suggestions

ease of use and multiple users for the same cost

Would like to separate out grants from companies

The training sessions coupled with the learning paths have made the transition from Salesforce to Neon CRM pretty seamless.

Neon CRM is so user friendly and the learning paths are making it possible for our entire team to get trained.

This is hard to answer because we are still very new to Neon CRM. We have navigated a few bumps on the registration page, but nothing to make us regret this migration.

You want CRM software to do 3 things: 1. Safely store you data 2. Allow you to leverage your data 3. Allow you to interact with your organizations website Most systems do the first 2 - they better (!), NEON does the third one too and better than any other product in the industry. My only hope is they don't get bought by Blackbaud. I've done 15 or more conversions with many different product and have never been happier than with NEON. Feel free to drop me a line and I'll share more with you.

I won't comment on the other features NEON does that other systems do as well - or almost as well. Instead, I'll focus on the factors that set them apart from the other players on the market. FORMS! - how can any org look past the ability to survey their constituents via email and then have the responses post to the database? e.g. How did you hear about us? a - k / What most interests you about our work? a.b.c. d. free form response / How would you like us to communicate with you? a - d Events! NEON is the industry leader in allowing users to enter info via an org's website and into the database. I have one client using NEON that registers athletic event users via their website - all the way down to the waiver release form via a digital signature. All that info results in a paperless process that posts to their website on the back end. Training - online video training is FREE - you won't get that with eTapestry or DonorPerfect.

The reports function features a URL for a particular report (dynamic too). This is is fantastic! But many board members and volunteers need to be reminded to access the url and it would be great if NEON would schedule the delivery of reports on an ongoing basis rather than the user having to schedule the delivery of the reports. A small thing, but one less thing the user has to think about doing.

If your experience is anything like mine was, you are currently struggling with outdated software. You are having to maintain multiple databases manually in order to do all the things that are standard operating procedures in these fast-paced days, and you are working on a shoestring budget with a great but stretched staff. For me, this is where Neon came in to help us. Is it perfect. No. Of course not. Unless you have a zillion dollars to house your own tech department you are unlikely to find absolute perfection. Is Neon, in my opinion, the closest thing to perfect for a non-profit organization? Yes! Why do I think that? 1) Technology upgrades every 18 months (at the longest) which is almost impossible for a non-profit to keep up with while remaining competitive within today's business world. Neon is an ever-evolving system that shares functionality with all Neon clients; your membership database is always up-to-date with new innovations appearing and available to be customized to meet your needs for reasonable pricing (unlike other systems that, in my experience, started customization at around $25,000 a piece). 2) When hosting our own CRM on-site, we were responsible for maintaining our server; with an aging server and without a hardware specialist on staff, our data was always at risk, even though it was backed up. With Neon, our system is now a cloud-based system, leaving the hardware support to the experts at Neon. This was not only a worry off our backs but also a fiscal savings. 3) In order to keep up to date, we were maintaining multiple databases. We had our member database, our event database, our website member-only database, and our email database. This doesn't include the QuickBooks upkeep and our area membership lists that had to be maintained and exported separately on a monthly basis. Needless to say, this ate up a lot of time and was susceptible to human error. With Neon, everything was in one place (Please note we chose to use Neon's email because another service would mean we once again would have to import/export data and not have the tracking material on the records where we wanted them). This was a huge benefit. Having everything available in one place freed up our staff to work on other projects and spend time on long-term strategic planning as opposed to just working in the moment. 4) With our old system, we were the experts. We were all alone. If we wanted customer service, the vendor could sort of help but the service teams wouldn't take time to understand the way we were using the system and could only provide generic answers. With Neon, we have experts at the end of a chat or a phone call (depending on your needs and service package) who can log into your system, see what you are seeing, and team with you to find an answer to your issues. 5) With our old system, our volunteers and members had limited abilities and options available to them. With Neon, our volunteers and members have a greater level of interaction with their own records, as well as with each other. So with all that said, my overall advice is get Neon. But when you do jump in also be realistic and patient with both Neon and your staff. Remember change is always hard. Expect that the transfer of data will be stressful. Expect that the first six months will include hiccups. Expect that in a year you will be an expert in NEON. Expect that your "sophomore" year experience will make it all worthwhile.

Overall, this is a pretty robust software considering the price. I would recommend it to Non-profits on a tight budget just be prepared for some getting acquainted time.

All our data can be stored and pulled from one place. Event's are seamlessly connected to our website and make for an easy registration process. I like the idea of batch uploading because data entry can be time consuming but this hasn't been as successful as I'd hope yet. Still need to learn more.

It isn't as user friendly as some of the other softwares. We have to adapt it internally to meet our needs. I was not at the company when we purchased this software so not sure of the onboarding process. It has been hard to bring new employees on to learn the system.

Overall my experience has not been great. In particular I have been extremely disappointed by the technical support or lack of support. We pay for telephone support but can never reach anyone or get anyone to return calls

The software has capacity to do many functions

NEON has it's own language and it the user experience is not very intuitive. We are a NON Profit that does not have full time employees. Our users struggle to find ways to do what should be the simple tasks

Great tools for managing donor system- love the automatic thank you emails, donation forms, database, reporting, etc. Also love the ease of use with Events and Campaigns.

The donor and members features did not work well together where it was not reporting member contributions as donor contributions (IRS allows member contributions to be tax deductible as long under $75). We now just use the members feature with zero value in order to be able to send them annual reminders (and mark their member contribution as a donation). Not working perfectly but it's what we do for now. Another piece that I do not like is the customer support is either hard to get or not timely in their responses. It often takes 48 hours or more for a response, and sometimes I have to remind them I am waiting for a response. The delay of response makes is so I forget to follow up on the issue that we were having. Very frustrating at times.

We are a small charity and had never used crm before so we decided to jump in, primarily at first to register people for an event. It is not intuitive or user-friendly. There are training videos you have to watch before you can call in, but 45 minutes into them, they only answer the most basic questions. Forget customizing your forms or registration. We are not IT people who spend all day writing code so we find it difficult and sometimes impossible to use. The social fundraising has been a nightmare as people who set up a team find themselves unable to join their own team! I don't know what we're doing wrong but we find this really hard to use. We've tried our best for over a year now so feel like we gave it a good chance.

It seems to have a lot of features

The features are hard to use. Customization is extremely difficult. Social fundraising is a nightmare.

Have been using Neon CRM for 4+ years now for my nonprofit and while the learning curve was somewhat steep, the logic now makes sense. Also the Neon One training videos and online library make searching for the answer easy. When that fails, I email a Neon Guru and they get back to me pretty quickly. Event registration is easy, as is the management of events and attendees. They've made a number of improvements over the last four years that have made Neon better and easier to use. Neon Inspire website is also really easy to use. Membership database is really good.

We've had to do some creative thinking to establish a gift membership purchase option which is a little frustrating, but it works. Would like to see our lifetime member level offered along with the regular membership levels when a member renews (give them the opportunity to upgrade!). Would like a way to rotate submitted member photos.

Average. I'm invested now, but it's not my favorite product. I think there's a big learning curve. As I learn more, I'm still so-so about the software as a whole, but will keep at it for a while because it's too hard to transition to another software. The updates and new features that have come out have made some improvements.

I love that I can manage everything from one software platform - donor management, donation, payment processing, event registration, and email campaigns

It is frustrating that I have to go to different screens to get something done. There aren't intuitive ways to get a project done. I have to adjust a setting here, then create something, then adjust something else on another page. I also do not understand the reports. They are too complicated to get simple information.

Overall, a great system which I'm glad we found. We tried a few others to manage our 3 levels of membership, and none of them lived up to the sales pitch. NeonCRM has so far.

It can do a lot in terms of membership: Allow new members to join, current and expired members to renew, membership discounts, etc. It's quite affordable, too, and the customer support seems solid so far.

Running reports can be difficult because there are so many possible data fields that a member can have. I've had considerable difficulty, for example, finding members who signed up--who didn't renew and weren't past members--between certain dates. It's probably just one or two fields in the report that I haven't included, but it's quite frustrating. And though the online help center has a lot of content, I've had to contact support several times because I couldn't find what I was looking for online. We set up our system in about a week and a half--significantly faster than the recommended timeframe. I have considerable experience with CRMs, and most small organizations would likely have substantial difficulty setting this up themselves. Most organizations will likely want to work closely with Neon to launch their system to its fullest potential.

I've used several different CRM programs and I find Neon CRM relatively easy to use and affordable. It is very capable of fulfilling the needs of our organization. I also appreciate how fast Neon customer service responds to questions.

Being able to pull the data easily for what I need when I run reports. And being able to individualize the main page so that I can instantly see donation increases in the campaigns that I'm interested in.

When first learning to use I would miss a donation when looking at an individual's record- if that donation had been added to their partner's account instead. To remedy this I linked the households together and now only check this page so I can make sure to see all the gifts made in one place. It would be helpful though to be able to add mailing list tags to entire households instead of only by the individual.

It constantly surprises me with how well they have designed features. There is a lot we haven't explored yet. The Help and Support site is great, especially the video modules and the webinars. We don't pay for support as the few issues we have had they answer in a day or so with helpful answers. The one exception was an obscure bug I found in the 'new" workflow process. It was fixed in the next release.

I did an indepth analysis of non profit CRM systems and this came out on top. We could not afford anything expensive so the price was right. It has all the finctionality we need so far. It did not have "installment due" automated reminders but a few months ago they added workflows which are unbelievable powerful tools to not just send out reminders based on various triggers but you can perform multiple actions based on the trigger. The communications ( eblasts) is very well thought out. In fact we are about to stop using MailChimp & save their fees

So far we have not had great success in using it for event registration and processing. There are two many payment screens and we had s few credit cards declined. But to be fair, we did not dig into the reasons. We reverted back to Brown Paper Tickets but are looking at other products for our complicated multi-table registrations.

I work for a small, public charter school. The school had never tracked donors, incoming donations, or consistently sent thank yous. The only data that I had available to load into NeonCRM were from folders of thank you letters that had incomplete/incorrect contact information in some cases. I imported the current parents of our students this year as well as any data I could glean from the thank you letters for the previous 3 school years. NeonCRM allowed us to more easily communicate with all of our constituents. The thank you letters are formatted to include tokens that make the letters more personal as well as contain photos and accomplishments of our student body. They are also are set up with different text and photos based on whether the donation is designated, in-kind, or unrestricted because that data is easily tracked in the software. For the first time, KAPS participated in Giving Tuesday with an email campaign and also did an EOY appeal, neither of which had been attempted in the past. The EOY campaign brought in 30% of our donations for the year in the last two weeks of December. Several of the donors elected to become part of a new Friends of KAPS organization that is in its infancy. We were also able to send a donation summary for tax purposes this January, which had also never been done by the school. The reporting helps us target donors for specific appeals and know who has (and hasn't) given recently. We were able to get several people to sign up for recurring donations that increased our sustainability. My current efforts are two-fold: 1) increase the use of the constituent portal, and 2) track volunteer hours using the Volunteer module so that we can report this data in grants that we are pursuing. NeonCRM has been instrumental in taking our organization to the next level: helping us to maximize our constituents, increase our bottom line, and help us to become a professional charter school that is responsible with our constituents monetary donations. I would highly recommend NeonCRM to others looking for a constituent database. (My only reason for giving a 4 on Ease of Use is that, being a small organization, I was not able to attend training. However, the videos and online manuals helped me determine how to use the software. The NeonCRM support staff were also very helpful if I couldn't find the answer to my question on my own.)