DonorPerfect for the Smaller Non-Profit

I highly, highly recommend, DonorPerfect, and am currently attempting to have my present employer switch to it from a far less intuitive donor database. I honestly cannot sing the praises of DonorPerfect enough. It is a donor database designed by fundraisers, who continuously accept input from other fundraisers.

Pros

There is so much to love about DonorPerfect. After 10 years in professional fundraising, working with everything from the most-known donor database to numerous smaller ones, DonorPerfect really is perfect. It's extremely intuitive, and extremely customisable. During my training, I was actually jumping ahead of my trainer, and ended up not using a full two hours of the training DonorPerfect provides. Furthermore, I was able to quickly and easily train others on how to use the database.

Cons

There was one quirk around using Tab, where it would skip a field near the top of the main Constituent page, then jump back up to it. I never did figure out how to work around that issue.

Happy with DonorPerfect

Overall, it's been much easier to segment our donors and personalize their experience. We feel much more confident using DP than our previous software, because it's easier to pull reports, etc.

Pros

Setting up DP was very easy and we were able to customize several field. The ability "globally update" has proven to be a very useful tool. We like the ability to customize our pages to suit our needs.

Cons

Some of the add-ons are too expensive for our organization to purchase, however, we can see how those tools would be useful, so it's a bit frustrating.

Frustrated with a few main features.

Pros

The integration with Constant Contact allows us to see whether a person is opening our emails (and create calculated fields based on their engagement) without having to log into Constant Contact. And we can still take advantage of Const Contact's good reputation, style templates and easy user interface. I like that I can set up monthly donations within our system and the credit card data is stored there (securely). There is a lot of flexibility in what you can do. The downside to this is the more you customize/deviate from the standard "donor only tracking" the less the built in reports will help you.

Cons

You can not find, sort, view and edit a subset of records within the database. We end up exporting most of our reports to excel, which is very counter-intuitive, takes more time and often ends up resulting in a lot more work as people edit the excel spreadsheet which then must be re-imported. The lack of this functionality is causing us to look around at other software. It does not have a good way to manage households: they recommend putting spouses on the same record, and if one is a business owner (whose business gives separately), the business shows up as a duplicate record on many reports and must be manually removed. And I have no idea how they would handle it if you put spouses on separate records (so you could track their volunteer hours separately, for example)! How would their donations show up? How would you make sure they didn't receive duplicate mailings? If you were segmenting your database into 3 chunks (based on giving history), how would you make sure that the two spouses ended up on the same list? The automatic download (from weblink forms) is very primitive--there is not a very functional de-duplication system that allows you to compare the records being added with what is already in the database. So as a result, you are likely to lose data or end up with lots of duplicates. The calculated fields can be very powerful, but they are SO counter-intuitive. They do not allow you to create formulas using if/then terminology without having to create multiple calculated fields that interact with each other...and there is no way to group the calculations together so you can remember what you did. I wish they used standard formula protocol like excel and filemaker do.

Powerful yet easy touse!

The tech support is world championship level!

Pros

Over the years I have used a plethora of software. What makes DP the winner is how easy it is to customize the screens for various types of roles the various users may have.

Cons

To be brutally honest, there is a very steep learning curve. The youTube page has great tutorials and the DP User Community is a great resoirce

Thanks DonorPerfect

Pros

The features that I find most impactful are the reports that are available in DonorPerfect. It is so easy to run reports on almost anything that can be found in a donor file. Sometimes, if my report is not something that is in a DonorPerfect template, then I may have to call support. They are always very helpful.

Cons

One aspect of the software that makes it a little difficult to use are the phrasings that are used as descriptors. Sometimes they are not common phrases or mean one thing to the software designer but something different to the actual user. DonorPerfect does try to update these things, however, when brought to their attention by users.