DonorPerfect Fundraising Software

It should be noted that anytime I have been stumped and in a quandary...support via Chat or Phone has always more than met my expectations and helped deliver myself out of the problem with workable solutions.

Pros

To have in one place (under one roof; if you please) all donor records, giving history, data to merge to send letters and receipts, gift processing, contact management is excellent. I can't imagine how many other software products it would take to duplicate what Donor Perfect is providing.

Cons

Untold potential and depth of donor management, fundraising events, pledge "billing", processes still unlearned and haven't utilized. More on myself than Donor Perfect...2 years into use I am still exploring, etc.

The Pros far outweigh the Cons. Also, Donor Perfect tries to provide a great experience and useful product to both the one-click user and the user who likes to tinker. Donor Perfect is a powerful tool to have in the development office.

Pros

From the very beginning Donor Perfect is easy to use for simple tasks, such as Data Entry. The value of the product, however, is in its' flexibility and in the number of tasks that can be completed in one place. For example, features such as Instant Merge, Importing and be able to create organization specific Donor Pages are both quick and worthwhile to learn because much time will be saved in the long run. The reports are beautiful and most are easy to run. However, above all, the step-by-step user materials and the customer service is outstanding!

Cons

There may be a learning curve and the versatility of the software may be a bit overwhelming, particularly if you are a user who just likes to click one button and move on.

This is not a product that I would recommend to a growing company.

Pros

I am not sure I am able to say much in terms of any positive features for this particular product.

Cons

User interface was nearly non-existent, Seemed very prehistoric in terms of competitors like Raiser's Edge, etc.

Overall we are very positive on Donor Perfect and are working through all the startup issues and starting to get value through donor segmentation, automatic linkages, etc.

Pros

Donor Perfect has a fully integrated offering that is scalable to our needs. It links easily with our website for donations and also offers connections with Constant Contact for donor emails. It links with QuickBooks also. It includes volunteer tracking which is something we were looking for. Their phone support is especially useful and I am very glad that I included that in our purchase since we are a small non-profit with limited donor software experience. Their online training videos are great.

Cons

Since it has all the functionality needed for larger non-profits, it can be a little overwhelming at first to deal with all the options and alternatives. Also we purchased individual training which we found we were not ready for. We needed to be farther along the learning curve through more online learning so that the individual training would not be just getting us up to speed but dealing with our specific issues. Lastly we probably underestimated the amount of time it would take to make the transition from our old system to Donor Perfect.

Pros

Donor Perfect is very easy to use. The customer support is awesome. They are quick to answer any questions.

Cons

They do not interface with our accounting software. We are able to get around this issue. Would like to be able to use with more of our fundraising events

Pros

I like all the features donor perfect has. I like having my donor database and credit card possessing in the same place.

Cons

I do not like the fact you have to pay a higher rate to be able to use customer service by phone. If you're paying a lower rate you only get chat support. I also do like that you only get online training for set up. I still don't have ours set up so the way because I don't have time to watch videos to show me how.

I like DonorPerfect, but I do not like a smaller program left out of essential tools. This is a better program for someone to transition to when the organization knows what they need and could enter at the level that is BOTH cost-effective AND gives them the tools they need.

Pros

DonorPerfect has been in the business for quite a few years. Using the product a few years ago I was very pleased that it was easy to use and teach and found it to be an overall great experience.

Cons

I recently explored the software as an option for relatively new nonprofit. DonorPerfect offered lots of entry points with reasonable pricing at each. What I found, however, is that for an organization to be most effective adding on modules is necessary and moving up to the next level may be wisest. Thus, the entry-level options are not really the cost-effective tools as they are promoted.

Pros

The product is a user-friendly and intuitive, which makes it a great resource and whenever there is a question, the customer service team is excellent in addressing and helping to facilitate your problems.

Cons

DonorPerfect is missing some key components that other programs, like Salesforce has, which makes for a smooth integration of the various components necessary for Development.

Pros

Customer service is exceptional. The very basic or preloaded reporting functions are easy to use. Webinars can be helpful, but are time consuming. Search box has the option to show similar results so spelling names correctly is not paramount.

Cons

Without updating to the second or third tier the DonorPerfect software is extremely frustrating. There is also a huge learning curve to get used to. It feels as though whenever we want to customize a report, or use the system beyond its basic search features it is either much to complicated or the system requires and upgrade. So the bang for the buck is not there unless you upgrade. Once the system is upgraded it could be great, however that is not an option for our small non-profit.

Pros

Easy to use software. You can generate reports very easily especially for a new user with no experience

Cons

This software is only good for a small organization. A large organization with different streams of income will have issues with some features.

fantastic sales support, thoughtful answers to my questions

Pros

lots of functionality, good integration with outside platform, additional modules, flexibility, licensing, cloud access.

Cons

steep learning curve, data development considerations, need for training and follow up, learning to read and generate reports

It is a relatively customizable SQL system. If you are primarily mail based and not internet based, it is a good system. Again customer support is very good. But it seems to have grown out of the pre-internet world and is a long way from a modern UI feel. (It was only August 2016 that an attempt was made toward mobile friendly donations forms.)

Pros

Customer support has been very good. They help where they can and know their limitations. There are times when you can find solutions that customer support cannot. But if they don't know, they don't try to make something up.

Cons

UI is out of date. If your donors are old, it may be ok. If your donors shop Amazon and expect that quality, you will be disappointed. For example, online giving forms will take your donors off your website to DonorPerfect's secure payment system. You either have to do this in an iframe (and lose all hope of mobile friendly formatting), or open the donation in another window and let the donor go off your site (for the most part).

If you use the API, the rules you use to clean data and tabulate custom values won't work. There is no way to trigger those actions for data that enters through the API.

My current frustration is that if you want to use PDF receipt attachments, the PDFs are generated as 72dpi images. That is the quality of a 1990's era fax.

Pros

Accesses all the data I could imagine needing, easily accessible, trainer has been most helpful and competent

Cons

Took quite a bit of effort to migrate data to DP, a lot of the actions are not intuitive and require some training.

other staff members are able to run reports that sort donors by different criteria - I will learn how to do this too, in the next year, but so far, my colleagues love this feature.

Pros

easy and logical way to enter all the data and then check it later to verify contributions. nice that it has room for notes etc.

Cons

sometimes DP does not catch the correlation between a new name I am listing and a previous entry's ID (of which that new name is part of the already-listed donor) until after I have typed everything in ... I would like to have this pop up when I do the initial search, not after I have spent some time entering it. Perhaps you know a way I can streamline this, or you can tell me what I am doing wrong. It's probably operator error (me)!

We are grateful for Donor Perfects' product which helps us in our mission to empower at-risk kids. Like most products of its type, it can be complicated. But, the Donor Perfect team is always there to help.

Pros

We have been using Donor Perfect for four years now. During the time we have been able to double our revenues – thanks in part to Donor Perfect and the support tools which come with it. We have everything integrated – constant contact, website pages, donation processing, and event registration. The ease of integration and automatic recording of online donations has made Donor Perfect our tool of choice.

Pros

DonorPerfect is easy to navigate and being able to retrieve information is vital. When attempting to raise money time and up to date information is your best friend.

It's a good value for the money but there are other software packages at the same price point that offer more up-to-date features. (NEON comes to mind!)

Pros

Very customizable; great customer service; easy to use and learn. Rarely have any problems with it.

Cons

Reports are not very customizable...most reports I have to do by hand in Excel after exporting data. "Canned" reports are pretty limited.

Pros

Although we are still learning how much Donor Perfect can do the biggest asset of the software is that it comes with fabulous customer support!

Cons

Their additional services can be pricey, especially for a small non profit. The reports have a bit of a learning curve but as long as you have phone support you can get through it!

Overall, this system has worked very well and I look forward to learning more about how I can better use its functions and capabilities. I can't comment much on the financial side of things because I mostly enter data and run spreadsheets for mail merging for mailings.

Pros

Customer Support and Training has been the most awesome feature of using DonorPerfect for me. I have learned a lot from the webinars available and whenever I call support for a certain problem, the staff are always very knowledgeable, professional and patient.

Cons

DonorPerfect has some features that I find cumbersome or just don't work well. (or maybe it's user ignorance!) The system is set up to have a "man and wife record" but if you have a man and a wife that have different roles (flags) and different cell phone numbers etc... you have to lump the info together in the record. You can make two separate records, but then when doing mailings, you will get duplicate mailings to one household. We also have the same problem with having an organization record, for e.g. ABC Corp. with Bob Smith as contact and then an individual record for Bob Smith. This is because sometimes ABC Corp donates and sometimes Bob Smith will donate as an individual by playing golf or running a 5K or contributing personally to the Annual Appeal. But again we don't want two mailings to go to Bob Smith. I also have a problem when receipting donations that after I generate the receipts and go back to where you update the batch, "All transactions" button has been defaulted to, even though I have chosen "user transactions". If I don't remember to go check that, I end up updating all the transactions instead of just my own. I also have wondered about making the filter building less cumbersome by having a way to build filters using more than two variables at a time. For a complicated filter you have to do several compound filters to get what you want.

Some features require additional payment, such as integration with Constant Contact or customizable online donation forms. Some features such as receipting and event management I do not use because my organization prefers other methods.

Pros

Reports are very powerful and saves you the effort of having to do something similar in Excel, the pre-made ones are useful and you can also build your own. There's a lot of different fields so you have many ways to capture and analysis donor/gift information. The DP Community webinars and articles/discussions do a decent job of teaching you the basics if you can figure out the right search terms for what you need and are willing to experiment with your database. Importing and exporting with Excel is fairly easy.

Cons

There's little difficulties in functionality such as an error message of another user being logged on each time you leave the site and try to return, or not being able to work in multiple tabs. It makes multitasking impossible when you can only open one constituent entry. Some features are not organized coherently, why is mail merge templates under settings instead of under mailings?