Abila Fundraising 50 (Sage) Software

Pros

I love how you can keep track of all the donations coming in and what person donates and what they donate

Cons

I hate that you can only have one person signed in at one time or you have to pay more. That is so stupid

Pros

Is able to integrate with other software available to fundraisers and essential for donor management.

Cons

Is known for running very slow. There are sometimes long wait times for customer service or a lack of understanding of what's being said.

Pros

Integrates well with other software and makes staying on top of mailings and contact fairly easy to do

Cons

The conversion from previously used software could be a little smoother and more efficient but that’s all

Pros

Ease of the product
Endless capabilities
Takes care of all my needs as a small business couldn't ask for a better

Cons

Sometimes runs really slowly. Long wait times for customer service calls. Person on phone doesn't always understand my problem.3

Pros

Abila is a solid database it's able to store lots of information about constituents. It's easy to look up this information.

Cons

The text on the screen is small and there's no way to change the size. Reporting is very complex and the results are not always the way you need/want them.

Pros

Abila FR50 is an inexpensive option for your CRM needs - it has all the necessary functionalities and good chat support

Cons

Abila FR50 doesn't have some of the capabilities of other more expensive products, and can feel clunky at times in its usability

Cons

The reports are complicated. I can't trust that report pulls all necessary data. There are No help resources.

This is the first system I ever used so I thought it was terrible when I started. Now I've used CiviCRM and I long for the days when I had Fundraising 50.

Pros

If you need a basic CRM, this system is great. It has a dashboard that lets you know where you are with your fundraising goals without having to run a report. There are great trainings to learn how to use it. You can customize quite a bit.

Cons

There are no bells and whistles. It's very basic. It would work best for an organization that can input every donation received individually, because it can't pull donation information directly from the donation page.

Having used several database programs over the past 19 years, I find Abila (was Sage) 50 to be difficult, non-intuitive and definitely not user-friendly. It is a struggle to pull information into a report, and if there is one small mistake, the program does not indicate what the specific problem is so you have to go back and rewrite the whole thing until you get it right. In other programs, you can change an item, then just hit run without having to rewrite it again. I also don't care for using color dots to categorize certain data.

Cons

See above.

Advice to Others

Make sure you try writing reports before purchasing!

We purchased this software for our small non-profit. It is very easy to use to enter data. It has many reports to choose from also.

Pros

Easy of entry

Cons

Pulling reports

Likes Best

They are a very good value and quality product. We could use them a very long time.

Likes Least

I dislike nothing about this product and vendor.

Recommendations

I have no recommendations for others evaluating software like this.

As a nonprofit publisher, we currently have over 80,000 constituents in our database. Prior to Sage Fundraising 50, we used KMAi (now MPower). We decided to leave KMAi because we could not create reports easily or export our data. Extracting information from KMAi was not easy, but we were able to extract the data we felt was critical to our organization with the help of ProSoft Solutions.

Implementation was relatively smooth; much of the difficulties involved data extraction rather than importing into Sage Fundraising 50. Our staff quickly adapted to Sage Fundraising 50. Overall, staff gained approximately 12 hours of time each week through use of the import functions. ProSoft Solutions provided excellent support throughout the conversion process and after.

We were using another donor system to process our credit cards and record them. It was very limited in its usage and difficult to get information reporting. Then we got Sage Fundraising 50. This system is easy to understand and use. You are in complete control of the coding and interface between it and your accounting system. It has so many standard reports that help you to find what you need quickly.

I love this system and would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a high value donor management system that is priced right for the small to medium organizations.