Almost 4 years ago, when I considered which contact/donor relations management software platforms I was going to use for the ministry, here are a few of the things I was looking for: 1. Expandability (Will the system grow with us as we need it to without paying for what we don't need?) 2. e-Commerce - Are the e-commerce functions user friendly? Are they secure? Does it have integrated merchant service capabilities and can it seamlessly integrate with the database/account management capabilities? 3. Can I easily segregate, query, and manage contacts/donors? Can I track all of our touches with our contacts/donors and view them in one place/interface? 4. Do the front-end functionality components make it easy for our contacts/supporters/donors/etc. to communicate and do business with us? 5. Can we easily integrate our CRM communication/outreach/events/etc. into our existing website, social media, and vice versa? I was pumped when I got a "Yes" answer to all of the questions above from the team at Z2 Systems about the NeonCRM. I have extensive experience with some of the larger CRM providers and their products. I can say that without a doubt, the NeonCRM system is as functional, robust, expandable, and overall as capable, right out of the box, as systems costing 10 to 20 times as much. Clients are not hit with additional charges for modules that should already be included in the overall package. With regards to customer service and the company's employees and management actually listening to the customer and making adjustments to the system in order to meet the needs of the customer, Z2 Systems blows everyone else away. Coupled with its available seamless and cost-effective merchant services account integration partners, NeonCRM is a great option for any size organization and budget.

Overall, Neon CRM is a great product for the cost. As a smaller nonprofit, most of our budget goes directly back into youth programs.

Neon CRM is a simple, straightforward tool. It's easy to use and there are a lot of resources and tools to help onboard new users. It's cost-effective for our nonprofit and enables us to track donors, volunteers, and donations in one place.

A feature that could be improved at our subscription level is the ability to automate workflows. As it is, we have to manually pull reports to see if donors need to be contacted, moved along the pipeline, etc. It would be a huge improvement if Neon CRM offered a budget friendly alternative that enabled us to set contact on a pipeline and receive reminders when it's time to move them along.

We chose this software because it appeared to be able to do everything we needed it to. However, when getting into it more fully we consistently run into obstacles.

Good database function, automated emails, customized reporting.

We utilize the event module extensively and find that the functionality is difficult. The WYSIWYG feature to build an event page is difficult, you can't build sub pages for an event, no ability to have event add-on items (register for the event and buy a shirt, etc). I've had to add them into the store function and then make all events appear in the store function so that the add-on items would appear in the shopping cart with the registration - but there is no ability to customize a store item (i.e. personalization). The registration function is very confusing to our constituents in that you have to provide all information for the registrant before making the registration/ticket selection. Then the only place to put the add-on/store items is in the event registration summary page. The social fundraising functions are not terribly user friendly and intuitive. When you want to do registration discounts you can either take $ off or % off of the entire order - not off each registration when more than 1 person is registered. When I have asked about these features it has been suggested that we use Eventbright for events. We left event bright when we purchased NEON because we could save the costs with the integrated functions in NEON. Eventbright doesn't do social fundraising so this looked like a better option. And finally - duplicate accounts are a problem - especially because pricing is based upon the number of accounts. Merging/deleting accounts is a time consuming process. And, you cannot simply two accounts that should be merged (because you know they should be) unless the system identifies them based upon duplicate name, email, etc. For example - if a person registered using her home email and address for one event and then the next time she registered as that person's name using her work email the system won't recognize them as potential duplicates - and you can't manually select them to merge. The login feature we thought was good but unless you have memberships it isn't great - folks just don't log back in the next time the visit the site - they just create a new account.

Overall, Neon CRM has greatly improved our ability to track and steward donors. Our fundraising endeavors have greatly benefited as have our events. And automating many of the processes like acknowledgments has freed up more time to work on further improvements. It's been a huge improvement over the excel spreadsheets we were using previously.

The constituent portal is what really stood out for me and made me choose Neon CRM over other options.

There are certainly some features that could be improved or added. I've found donation batching to be cumbersome. There is no sustaining membership option, where a recurring donation can be counted toward a membership. And the duplicate merging process is clunky.