What are Sumac users saying about the software?

Excellent Membership Management

Our organization consists of 50 clubs spread throughout the Province. Each club maintains their own data which is visible only to them and to the organizations head office. This allows for consistent reporting around the Province. Implementing the system was completed within 3 months, including converting existing spread sheets and uploading them onto the database. Training was conducted in person and online. Sumac provided initial training for the Bowls BC Administrator.

Pros

The Sumac membership management system is flexible and easily customizable. Out of the box it can be used immediately but can also be tailored to specific requirements. The Cloud based database combined with its data security allows each clubs data to be maintained separately and securely.

Cons

It is sometimes difficult to load the software onto Mac computers. This mainly due to the Mac security system that is not always fully understood by the user. Loading the software onto a windows machine is very easy.

We looked long and hard to find appropriate software.

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Sumac - robust and affordable CRM

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Really, really helpful and easy-to-use software

Pros

Sumac has everything we need -- keeps our database, sends out our communications, keeps track of all our donations and receipts/acknowledgements. It is set up in a straightforward way and, when I first researched CRMs, it was the only one where I could understand the setup from the start (I think the others were not set up logically). Also, the support team at Sumac is wonderful; attentive, understanding, they are really willing to help me solve all my problems, whether it is a quick question or a larger issue that needs much more overhaul. In fact, they resolved the biggest problem I had with the software: I frequently must bulk import changes to my data, and there were parts I had to do manually because the contact types weren't available to use in the import workspace. But they have recently changed the import workspace to be more flexible, at least partly in response to my comments, so now my bulk imports go much more quickly. In addition, the program has many optional add-ons that can help with courses, volunteer hours, registrations, silent auctions and so many other bits of software that anyone might need. Also, it is very reasonable priced.

Cons

The only things that I find difficult are remembering all the little details of complicated searches, downloads, and the steps of emailing. But I am not very technologically savvy, and others will not be as easily frustrated as I am.

SUMAC - great CRM

After struggling for several years with an expensive database that was not intuitive and did not meet our needs, our organization looked into several others to replace it including Sumac which was recommended to us by another not-for-profit. We scheduled a demo with a Sumac Guru for our entire team and we were all captivated by the ease of use and functionality it offered – almost everything on our “wish list” (and much more). We then decided to purchase Sumac and have not regretted our decision. While there were a few hiccups with our data migration, overall we have been very impressed. It is very user-friendly, fast, and has features that we are still discovering a year after we started using it. The Sumac team is amazing and has been very responsive, accommodating and helpful when we have needed assistance in using the tool and putting through change requests when we have suggestions and identified areas for improvement.

Pros

User friendly Excellent customer support New releases on regular basis

Cons

Online functionality for some add-ons is very basic (e.g. ticketing) or not available yet (e.g. sales) The User Guide is good at describing each of the many fields in the database but limited in explaining how these are used together (processes)

Sumac is a compact and powerful tool. Our challenge is developing internal skills to use it fully

Consolidation of our enrollment and donation systems. Capacity to communicate with students and donors online.

Pros

Ease of interface after basic orientation. Exportable data. Capacity to track giving, enrollment, volunteer roles, auction, etc. It integrates all of the different dimensions we need to manage for our student, supporter and partners.

Cons

To fully use Sumac requires a growing understanding of the tools and strategies you can use to extract information and access the data you need. Building this capacity inside an organization takes a focused and sustained effort. In other words - at times we wish Sumac was more intuitive but we realize its diversity of features is probably more important than its ease of use.

Sumac Nonprofit software is fabulous and very USER-FOCUSED!

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Sumac is very user-friendly. I like how we can use it for donors, volunteers and clients.

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

The IT guys have been great and very helpful.

Accuracy. Mail merge. Email mail merge. Donations management. Excellent. They understand the work of a non-profit.

Pros

It is accurate. Based on the cloud and reasonable for all you get. I can customize the columns, data that I need which is quite different from other non-profits. I can have different "offices" which really helps with the multiple projects that I am responsible for.

Cons

I still need help in using the Campaign feature. It might be me, but I haven't quite got that figured out.

Okay.

Nothing special.

Pros

Fairly easy to customise, fairly intuitive, once gets into it. Search Builder is nice, once understood.

Cons

Cluttered. For example, Having all gifts in the same group as any other notes and points of donor contact is rather frustrating due to the cluttered nature. Likewise the Contacts page- much prefer single Search field, then a full list which is searched. And I have no idea if there's an easy way to see direct mail statistics (i.e., % of responses, average raised based on responses, etc.). That's a feature I've become very accustomed to and am missing greatly. Not a bad donor database; but honestly? It's not DonorPerfect.

Sumac is an affordable, customizable system for case management and reporting.

Pros

Sumac provides a customizable platform for managing our programs and services, tracking communications and case management. We are planning to expand our use and utilize more modules and expand our use of existing ones. The software is growing with us as we move a team into an online Case Management model after 30 years of pen and paper. We have set it up so we master uses one at a time and have eased the transition of staff. This has been a blessing as I have worked with other organizations that have lost staff as an out of the can software full of bugs was implemented with little room for transition. While for some the customization may be a challenge the benefit is huge. If you do not have someone to work with to complete the customizations there is an affordable option available working with the Sumac team.

Cons

The email component does not allow for, (or I have not figured out how to), multiple emails, so we only use it for mass emails as the responses can only go to one address.

Indispensable tool at our office. There's no facet of our operation that doesn't rely on Sumac.

Flexibility. Can easily grow. Different levels of security and accessibility. Great support. Always adding new modules.

Pros

It integrates everything. With Sumac we can generate output to determine trends or targets, even deficiencies, by combining seemingly unrelated data. There's no data-based relationship we cannot explore and mine for fresh insights. I like that it is held off-site so that we do not have to worry about additional data security. Of course, this also makes our Sumac data available anywhere, anytime.

Cons

Some of the modules have a steeper learning curve, but I don't see how that's avoidable. The biggest deficiency for me is that I would love an ap (application). Personally, I work with an iPad and right now I cannot access Sumac with that platform.

Sumac has been extremely helpful to our organization to track our client and donor database.

Pros

I especially like the facility for reporting. I like how it interfaces with other programs such as Excel and Simply Accounting. I also love how it does automatic credit card transactions.

Cons

I can honestly say that It has been rare that I have had issues with this program. It has always been because of my lack of knowledge of it's capabilities. A phone call will usually clear up any issues I have. The only problem we have encountered is to link our website donations to the program. We are still not sure where this glitch lies.

Fairly easy to navigate even for someone with fairly basic computer literacy.

We now use only 2 programs for all client information retention rather than the 4 we had previously. The other program we use is mandated otherwise, I can see where we could have set up another program within Sumac to have everything in one.

Pros

Once familiar with the program, it is quite user friendly. The ability to customize forms for different programs has been wonderful.

Cons

I would like the relationship links easier to use. Many of our staff do not create families as it is a further page a bit more cumbersome than other programs that we use, such as Link2Feed.

Overall Positive Experience. Easy to use and navigate. Good Customer Service.

An easy way to manage our membership and donations programs.

Pros

I like the Membership and Donation platforms. Compared to our previous system it is very easy to update records, put in payments, and track donations with certain campaigns. Its also easy to run numbers for my director and give detailed stats.

Cons

There is not much to dislike but probably the search functions on the Contacts page. It would be great to have a search bar to search last name, organization name, province, etc...

Intuitive isn't usually a word used with databases. It is with Sumac.

We are a small, non-profit, educational foundation based in Northern California. Prior to having Sumac, we maintained all our donor records in Quick Books and on Excel spreadsheets. Needless to say, that method made generating reports and extrapolating useful data a tedious task. Since installing Sumac, we operate so much more efficiently now. Multiple users at a time can access data in real time for quick answers to questions that would have normally taken hours, sometimes days, to get. Intuitive isn't usually a word used with databases. It is with Sumac. For the most part, almost anything you need to do on Sumac can be figured out due to it's user-friendly interface and design. And if you can't figure it out, there are hundreds of video tutorials that show you step-by-step how to get the task done. When a video tutorial just isn't enough, we call Sumac's technical support. They are OUTSTANDING. They are knowledgeable, friendly, patient and professional. It's so reassuring to know that if you need help, there is a live person available to walk you through what you need. SUMAC LISTENS TO YOU. Recently we discovered that we had many duplicate records in our database. Batching them together two-by-two to resolve the duplicates was taking a lot of our valuable time. We contacted Sumac to ask if there was a way that this process could be streamlined. Sumac worked on a fix and has now just updated their entire system to be able to accommodate resolving four records at once. Because of a suggestion we made, they rolled out an improvement that will now benefit all Sumac users. This type of boutique service is why we love Sumac and why we are grateful to have them on our team.

Sumac was a life saver when our privately designed database stopped working.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

SUMAC - CRM review

After struggling for several years with an expensive database that was not intuitive and did not meet our needs, our organization looked into several others to replace it including Sumac which was recommended to us by another not-for-profit. We scheduled a demo with a Sumac Guru for our entire team and we were all captivated by the ease of use and functionality it offered almost everything on our wish list (and much more). We then decided to purchase Sumac and have not regretted our decision. While there were a few hiccups with our data migration, overall we have been very impressed. It is very user-friendly, fast, and has features that we are still discovering a year after we started using it. The Sumac team is amazing and has been very responsive, accommodating and helpful when we have needed assistance in using the tool and putting through change requests when we have suggestions and identified areas for improvement.

Sumac is a great option for not-for-profit organizations that are looking for database management.

management of 5000 items in a database; tracking attendance, sending newsletters, and tracking donations and issuing tax receipts, sending mailouts

Pros

A great way to manage show attendees, we like that we can track who has donated and who has seen performances and what dates; contact types are very useful, as is the search builder function.

Cons

Very difficult and time consuming to upload batch information, especially if we do it infrequently enough that we need to relearn each time. Not intuitive in that way, annoying that you have to go through and have events set up first before you can attach an email or campaign to them - not very flexible in that way and requires you to always remember how the system works and the multiple steps involved with each new data capture.

We had a challenging start, but over the past 6 months have had much better results with support.

Pros

It is customizable to our needs (mostly). Some of the features we would find beneficial are not available.

Cons

We have encountered a number of bugs over the past few months in working with our trainer. She has been awesome in documenting and reporting them but the training time it ends up taking up in trying to find work arounds or confirm that it is in fact a bug is frustrating.

Sumac is a great value if you are a small nonprofit, even for an arts organization.

Pros

It is very basic and easy to use. The support is great. It is also on the cloud. Reporting is great for most functions.

Cons

We were never able to integrate our ticketing and donations so have to import everything from other systems. We were not able to batch import so it is very time-consuming. Same is true of our marketing email.

I have found it easy to use for the program I work with.

Access to information and statistics quickly

Pros

I like that I can choose what to see based on my needs. it is easy to change my preferences within a few seconds.

Cons

There is not any concern at this time. Recently there was a switch with two categories and a few sections did not transfer over and I had to re-enter family sizes.

Thrilled with the highly customizable functionality of SUMAC & wonderful customer service support.

Universal usefulness for nonprofit work, customized fields and data tracking, unified database across multiple departments within the whole organization, relatively simple-to-use interface, fantastic and responsive customer service and training, and so much more!

Pros

The ability to customize the software for every need we have, from volunteer records, student progress tracking, donor management, and everything in between!

Cons

There is a slight learning curve for anyone not already familiar with manipulating reports from raw data, but the training, customer service, and tutorial videos are extremely helpful in building those skills for full software functionality.

Sumac is quite easy to use and has great support staff

Pros

The website integration is great and easy to use. It has saved us a lot of time and money. It is great that users are able to sign in with their login

Cons

I wish you were able to build your own reports. It can be difficult to pull the information I need in a timely manner

Sumac for NonProfits

I highly recommend it for other non-profits.

Pros

I have found Sumac to be the answer I was looking for to manage both clients and donors. After initial set up it was easy for my team to use and update information. The training videos are very helpful and available at any time.

Cons

Sometimes the glitches when updates happen, but IT support walked us through how to handle it and once we saved the process it was not an issue.