Bloomerang Software

This software is easy to use and has many customizable features that allow you to keep track of donations and donor profiles.

Pros

It has a user-friendly interface with a lot of functionality. There is an ability to customize many of Bloomerang's features so that you can properly record and track donations and gifts to your organization. For example, we have customized the groups categories to include how many years each donor was involved in an annual event we host. These features not only enable us to keep track of donations, but to pull more detailed reports that we can then use for targeted marketing campaigns.

Cons

I have a few complaints about the software's features although they may be considered as "areas for improvement" since they stem from my experience with other softwares' features. The first is an autofill for city/state based on zip code. It would also be helpful is the reports had the option to be organized by time data. When exporting acknowledgements using Bloomerang's template, they automatically convert to PDF which does not allow users to edit letters individually (for this reason we export to Excel and mail merge individually).

Pros

This software allowed our nonprofit to build donations with donors. We had a very positive experience using bloomerang. It has kept our information organized and allows us to dive into researching our donors to help widen our donor base.

Pros

We were having trouble directly reaching donors until we finally set up software to help us track our donors and be able to target specific groups, and reach out to those who had not donated in a specific time period.

Cons

The big issue we have run into is that it is not compatible to directly import / export information from out accounting software. This may be a function of the older accounting software we use, rather than a problem with Bloomerang, however.

Fairly new to Bloomerang but more accurate tracking of donations and ease of use has been a plus.

Pros

User friendly with huge potential for our organization to grow our donations, retain donors, and research current donors for ability to perhaps be a larger donor.

It will help us with our membership and development efforts.

Pros

I like the layout of the platform, ease of use, and help function (especially the videos). The staff are very pleasant and easy to work with.

Cons

Bloomerang's reporting function could be easier to use, it requires a lot of clicks and the columns are small. However, I expect that over time as I become more familiar with Bloomerang, I won't think that this is a problem.

Pros

User interface and ease of use as well as twitter integration. Also enjoy the ability to add custom fields for relationships.

Cons

Would love to have tasks alert you to your email and a few more customizations available for your dashboard view.

More time to raise money, feel more organized, can track progress and goals.

Pros

I can track everything about my donors and volunteers, including contact information, notes, giving and volunteer history, and all interactions from emails to personal meetings. But it doesn't require a lot of my time to enter this information, allowing me more time to actually do my job in raising money. It is very easy to then pull the information out in reports.

Cons

It isn't really made for event registration, and membership management could be improved. But it is easy to upload registration information from the ticket managing software we use.

It is a great database and donor management software and it offers the ability to keep all donor information in one place.

Pros

It is easy to use, all your donation information can be contained in one place. Allowing the user to make custom fields assures that you can personalize the information to fit your needs for information. Being able to add personal notes or interactions allows each staff member a place to record their own interactions with each donor.

Cons

The filtering can be somewhat complex and/or clunky and when adding a new contact it automatically adds them to every email lists you have created. It would be much better to let the organization choose which lists to add them to as you create a profile.

Bloomerang is ideal for agencies that are looking for a straightforward interface with the ability to customize fields and reports to your needs. Their social media integration, relationship tracking, and interaction fields takes our ability to get to know donors to another level. The import function, once you get the hang of it, is an incredible time saver. The ability to embed online donations via a custom Bloomerang form into our website has increased our online donations significantly. The program is continually improving and the customer service is excellent.

Pros

-User-friendly interface
-Pretty easy for beginners to pick up
-I love how you can make relationships between people (very nice to pull up a church and find out what volunteers and donors attend that church or go to that book club) and put people into households
-The giving summary on the donor profile and dashboard is a nice visual.
-I like the ability to create tasks (but it would be nice if they sent you email reminders for deadlines that are coming up)
-The ability to create interactions field is very helpful to keep track of your communications, meetings, and other cultivation items that don’t necessarily include a donation.
-Custom forms, including custom donation forms make it so easy to tailor fundraising campaigns.
-Very customizable reports and fields (we now use Bloomerang instead of paying for Volgistics to track volunteer hours)
-Using Bloomerang stripe with our online donation page is fantastic—Our online donations went WAY up from Paypal.
-Great responsive technical support---we use just the online chats and emails and haven’t found a need for phone support.
-Love that this database is always improving. Our last one did not have that capability, so I think Bloomerang has a lot of potential.
-Also love that it’s cloud based---our last database was not.
-You can link your Twitter feed to Bloom and it will automatically populate tweets that your constituents have tweeted, and it gets added to their engagement level.
-I’m using the import function for more and more things…donation entry, mailing interactions, attendance sheets, volunteer hour tracking. Once you get the hang of it, it can save a lot of time if done correctly.

Cons

-Report formatting: All reports export to excel, but it only exports the table and information. It would be nice if it at least included a title (so you remember what you’re looking at), and maybe a time and date it was run.
-Reporting: The new reporting function is very powerful and you can pull great information from it. I do have trouble with how Bloomerang collapses each query. With more complex reports it's hard for me to remember each part of my query when everything is collapsed into a small
-Multiple tributes/notificants (for holidays): You can only put in one tribute per donation right now.
-They need a much better way to input tributes and they also need a way to track and send acknowledgements to people: The honor/memorial function is currently the worst part of Bloomerang…it has a terrible, backwards work flow and a major oversight for nonprofits that process a lot of tribute gifts. Although you can add a “notificant” to a donation, there’s no way to actually send letters to notificants through the letter function. We’ve created a process to notify honorees and notificants manually that works great, but that’s something to keep in mind for folks that process a lot of honor/memorial gifts.
-Special note if you go through the conversion process: When you add a new constituent, there’s a field that Bloomerang populates a date called “Created”. However, when your data is transferred, your original Created dates (if it was tracked in your previous system) will be lost and they’ll all be put into Bloomerang as the date the data was transferred. Bloomerang needs to keep the integrity of the original "Created" date of constituents OR create a custom field to place that information so you can run future reports. [There is no way to use the import feature for us to go back and add this information in, so volunteers are adding it for us].
-Task list: I’d like the task list to show more details to help you know what the task is, and send email reminders. Right now you make a task and then forget about it.
-Letters need to export to word instead of a PDF. We have a pdf editing software here to get around that, but would like to keep our Family House fonts and make minor changes if needed, etc.
-Need a way to catch duplicate records (either with a report, or alert if you're entering an address that's already in the system)

Advice to Others

Take advantage of the conversion process to clean up your current database (are there any fields that you can combine, are there any data inconsistencies that you can fix). The only issue we had when we converted was when all entries into our "Date Constituent Added" field changed from the date we entered the constituent into our system to the date that we imported into Bloomerang. We had to go back through with a custom field and manually re-enter all "constituent add" dates. The customization ability is great, but as a user be careful to not get it too cluttered!

We love Bloomerang at my organization. We've been using them for a couple of years now, and it has not only streamlined our donor and gift processing capabilities but also our ability to track event attendance, send out emails, and so much more. The system requires some training and reports can be tricky to get a handle on, but the recent update has made them incredibly powerful. We would recommend this company without hesitation!

Pros

Flexibility, customization, customer support, technology

Cons

Emails and letters are limited in design and flexibility

Bloomerang has really helped our small non-profit get organized and improve donor communications and relationships!

Pros

It helps us keep donors and potential donors organized in a systematic way. I can pull reports to give board members and donors a clear picture of who is investing in our mission who we're planning to solicit.

Cons

I am waiting for the ability to upload files to attach to donor profiles.

Ease of use is good. We use this for donor interactions and web integration giving page mostly. We have not used for email or the real time donations/pledges because both marketing, accounting and membership use another system. Having a hard time getting some of our branches to see the value - they see it as another thing to do....

We have been very pleased with Bloomerang since its implementation a little over a year ago. We switched from Raiser's Edge, and made the right choice. The user experience with Bloomerang is far superior - it's attractive to look at, the functionality is simple and intuitive, and we can more easily pull reports. The aspect we appreciate the most is the ability to assign tasks among our team members and update prospect interactions. We were hoping that Bloomerang would integrate with Outlook to alert us when tasks were assigned and due, but until that happens we've built in a work-around: we set notifications on our Outlook calendars to remind us to check Bloomerang tasks ever other day. The ability to track as a team all of the interactions, follow-ups, and stewardship activities in real time helps us be more attentive and give better customer service to our donors. It's clear that Bloomerang was designed by fundraisers for fundraisers - it's a great database and fundraising tool.

We were apprehensive about change at first but the Bloomerang staff made the transition go smoothly. For almost a year now we have enjoyed the ease of entering and acknowledging donations, tracking and targeting donors and communicating with our constituents on a regular basis.

Online customer support was vital as we learned the program and worked through creating reports and newsletters. A Bloomerang representative was always available to answer all of our questions.

We have and will continue to recommend Bloomerang to any organization looking for a user-friendly but comprehensive donor management system. Thank you Bloomerang!

After spending days reviewing and testing multiple web based products for a small nonprofit to keep track of donors, interactions, events, etc, I decided to give Bloomerang a go. I have been very pleased with the product and have recommended it to several other Development professionals in my area. I am a very visual person and the ease of use and being able to see things visually is HUGE! The customer support is speedy and great to work with. I would tell anyone to give them a try for their organization!

Pros

It is basically everything i want

Cons

Still hoping for event management and someday being able to hook up to Facebook!

In 2014 we switched to Bloomerang for our donor database and it was a great decision. The software transition went smoothly and has been easy to use. Customer service is great and fast. I like the chat feature for simple questions. Someone is always ready to help.

Pros

The ease of use. It is very intuitive.

Cons

The only complaint is the limitations on the letter templates.

Advice to Others

The video tutorials are great. I recommend using them often.

I came into a new position and when the company mentioned their donor database it was like they were caught up in a hostage situation. They were stuck in an expensive contract with something they barely knew how to work with. A key component of my hire was that I knew how to work with this big, aggressive, expensive system. What a backward way to think! I had always heard of Bloomerang thanks to their presence at conferences, webinars and experts. To move to a simpler system meant more people could use this tool. So what do I like best? Bloomerang became an effective tool so that more than one person could use the system. Increased functionality meant we could accept online donations and training people became a cinch.
Bloomerang is an excellent tool and I can't see any areas for improvement. One feature several users including myself have requested is currently in development. So Bloomerang listens to their users to offer solutions and keep the platform moving forward. They are patching the holes in the roof and doing the maintenance needed- not making you buy a whole new house to get upgrades.

Pros

I came into a new position and when the company mentioned their donor database it was like they were caught up in a hostage situation. They were stuck in an expensive contract with something they barely knew how to work with. A key component of my hire was that I knew how to work with this big, aggressive, expensive system. What a backward way to think! I had always heard of Bloomerang thanks to their presence at conferences, webinars, and experts. To move to a simpler system meant more people could use this tool. So what do I like best? Bloomerang became an effective tool so that more than one person could use the system. Increased functionality meant we could accept online donations and training people became a cinch.

Cons

Bloomerang is an excellent tool and I can't see any areas for improvement. One feature several users including myself have requested is currently in development. So Bloomerang listens to their users to offer solutions and keep the platform moving forward. They are patching the holes in the roof and doing the maintenance needed- not making you buy a whole new house to get upgrades.

Everything during our transition went very smoothly; we are VERY happy with the Bloomerang system and I would recommend it highly. The on-line support lessons have proven to be valuable and the team at Bloomerang are very supportive and knowledgeable.

Bloomerang has an amazing product and is worth the investment.

Pros

Everything during our transition went very smoothly; we are VERY happy with the Bloomerang system and I would recommend it highly. The on-line support lessons have proven to be valuable and the team at Bloomerang are very supportive and knowledgeable.

Advice to Others

Bloomerang has an amazing product and is worth the investment.

We couldn't be happier with Bloomerang. We transitioned from another software almost a year ago and have watched our users increase, our donor retention grow, and the system's administrator (me) become much happier with managing everything from mailings to reports!

Pros

The ease of use and dynamic reports.

Cons

The import feature can be buggy, but as long as you have the account number associated with your import list, you're fine.

Advice to Others

Know that Bloomerang may do less than some of the competitors, but it does the important stuff well enough to make up for that. In fact, it is because of that focus that the system is a cut above the rest.

The ability to use software online makes it easy to connect anywhere. The reporting feature has made it easy to report to management on our new campaign quickly and accurately. The other feature we are excited about is the email function. The emails look professional and the ability to track who opens the email or clicks links is great information.