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.

Highly user friendly

Great customer service - very fast response time. Very patient in helping through issues. And, again, great usability.

Pros

One of the best features of this software is its user-friendliness. It takes almost no time at all for a new user to feel comfortable with it.

Cons

Doesn't always do exactly what I want, but then what does? Sometimes the periodic upgrades don't seem to make sense to me, or change things that were fine as they were.

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.

Economical fundraising tool for small nonprofits

We use DonorPerfect for donor record keeping, tax-receipt letters, donor reports, mailing lists for fundraising purposes, etc. It is a great tool for fundraising.

Pros

DonorPerfect Online is very user-friendly.

Cons

It would be nice if the DonorPerfect online could be integrated with Stripe online gift program.

Happy Camper!

We began using Donor Perfect when we were small—about 8,000 records. Today, after growing to over 30,000 with Donor Perfect, we are STILL using it, and it continues to meet our daily needs. Last year we incorporated Constant Contact for our eblast communications, and have never looked back. I recommend Donor Perfect to my friends in the non-profit world every chance I get—and they have become “raving fans” as well. The product, the support, the price…all get 5 stars from us!

Pros

It helped us grow from 8,000 users to 30,000 users. Growth!

Cons

Making the change a few years ago from the offine product to the online product was a bit scary, but the transition was seamless.