Almabase Erfahrungen

Highly Functional, Modern Solution for Fundraising, Crowd Fundraising and Alumni Management

Kommentare: Overall, I would recommend Almabase. Our organization took about 12-18 months to cutover from our legacy alumni website to NetCommunity in 2020-2021. We didn't anticipate cutover again this soon, but we were able to pull it off within five months of making the commitment. A lot of that is testimony to the support the implementation team and helpdesk at Almabase provide.

Vorteile:

We were looking for a solution that could deliver a modern and responsive website for a team that would need a less technical, day-to-day interface for management, data-synchronization, and low-code/no code page design and development. Our organization liked that Almabase integrated with Raiser's Edge NXT and that it could deliver on a number of key initiatives. During our website development and cutover process, we tested the platform's capabilities with Crowd Fundraising and a very complex Event. While there were some synchronization challenges, the Almabase support team was very responsive and helpful in making the process very successful.

Nachteile:

The donation/gift synchronization is well-developed, but the event module and community module will require some additional work to better develop an engagement score methodology. These weren't the highest priorities at the time of cutting over, but they will require significant time/resource investment on the part of our team to utilize to the greatest advantage.

Great features, easy to use, fair price

Kommentare: The alumni community platform provided by Almabase is helping us connect with alumni who have fallen off our radar. The system facilitates the communication of alumni with one another and encourages alumni to invite their classmates to join the system. Our alumni are able to update their information on the community profile page and then Almabase integrates with our CRM (Raiser's Edge NXT) to update our local alumni records. It has been a wonderful partnership so far and I look forward to seeing where the next several years leads us as we continue to develop this partnership.

Vorteile:

Almabase is a very intuitive platform for alumni community management. The system is easy to use no matter whether you are an end-user or a platform administrator. Creating content pages, events, campaigns, and job postings is a snap as the system leads you through providing the details you need to complete each task. As a former webmaster, I appreciate the ability to go into the code view for content pages so that I can manipulate pages to display according to my personal preferences.

Nachteile:

There is very little to dislike. Being pickey, I can say that the back-end of the platform does not always work the way I would want it to work. However, that is based on my own personal preferences for how I use the system and is not based on how the system was designed to function. For example, If I upload a spreadsheet of names and email addresses so that I can send out email communication to a group of constituents, the system will sometimes overwrite the name I associated with an uploaded email address because someone else (usually a spouse) has used that email address as their email address of record for their alumni community profile. So, Almabase will default to the name associated with the community profile instead of enforcing the name I uploaded with the spreadsheet. So...if I wanted to use the Almabase communication center feature to send a birthday greeting to Jane Doe...I would need to make sure that her spouse, John Doe, is not already using the email address I have on file for Jane as his community profile email address. If that does happen, Almabase will insert "John" into the dynamic first name field of my message instead of using "Jane" that I had associated with the email address in my spreadsheet. This platform-based setting to enforce the first name associated with an email address is my only issue but it is minor when compared with the robust features we enjoy.

Used to set up an alumni database for our existing and lost alumni

Kommentare: It was a useful tool in having all of your alumni information in one area and offered options that we ended up not using.

Vorteile:

The support staff was very helpful in the setup and in addressing any issues that we had. The overall building of the "base" was fairly easy.

Nachteile:

It didn't stand out enough as unique or needed to continue the yearly contract. We ended up using our new web platform to incorporate a signup form and keep alumni up to date.

Good Fit for Bridge City High School Alumni: Excellent Customer Service

Vorteile:

From the first demo throughout our selection process and onboarding, I found Almabase customer service to be a great asset every step of the way. I love the feature requests that are actually voted on by their users and implemented!

Nachteile:

Our Alumni group is from a smaller high school. So it's been a lot of learning on Almabase's part as well...getting to know our culture better and finding ways to help uniquely serve us. It's not really negative...it's just taken some time.

Necessary tool for our small alumni association; especially during COVID-19 era.

Vorteile:

Almabase has been a necessary addition to our alumni association as we seek increased engagement, especially during the COVID-19 era. The ability to bring alumni together on a platform has been ideal and allows for an "exclusive" benefit for our membership. The team, specifically [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] have been a great help customizing the site to our needs. Our team is small and volunteer, and as someone who is tech-challenged, I was still able to "create" the site with their continued help. The giving pages, recurring donation option, event management and map are some of my favorite features that add tremendous value. Overall we look forward to using this platform as our one-stop-shop for alum and supporters of our Academy.

Nachteile:

-The salesforece integration is not an integration at all. It only communicates basic details, like name and contact info. This was not communicated clearly during our initial conversation regarding our needs. However, the team is in the process of expanding that integration. I'll give a follow-up review once that's completed. - The mobile view is less than desirable, and an app would make this platform so much more valuable as most members are on their phones more than computers—especially when visiting the campus for events. - An e-membership card with a barcode and individual ID, that can be used in a mobile wallet would be a great addition, especially when checking in for events, purchasing items, etc. - Admin rights can be built out a bit more. - Overall the pro's outweigh the cons but will give a follow up review as we are only 5 days into the launch.

GSSM Transitions to Almabase

Kommentare: I am so excited about our new alumni directory! It is much more user-friendly than our former database and has many options that I have not even had time to explore or set up yet like the job board. I have received rave reviews from the alumni who have updated their profiles in our new directory. It was worth the investment of time and money to provide a robust database for our community.

Vorteile:

Almabase provides an easy-to-use, visually enticing database to house alumni data and a place for alumni to find classmates and make connections. The support received during the onboarding process was stellar and the resources provided were very helpful.

Nachteile:

I have no complaints. There were parts of the setup that I needed help with because I am not as tech-savvy as others may be, but I was able to complete the onboarding process, migrate data for 2700+ alumni, and set up a weekend-long event with their great support. I hit some snags, but they were fixed in a timely manner and I always received prompt responses.

Almabase provides excellent value for our alumni

Kommentare: Almabase is at the center of our alumni strategy. The goal is to provide alumni with a high-quality, tangible benefit to grow their affinity for our school and inspire volunteering, fundraising and more. The Almabase team is great to work with — not only addressing questions and issues quickly, but being a partner in devising our strategies.

Vorteile:

Product itself is super easy to use and the customer service is top-notch. Map feature is impressive and we have received great feedback from our alumni since launching recently. Almabase allows us to provide our alumni with a high-quality experience — keep them in touch, but also giving them networking/career opportunities they desire. The email functionality inside Almabase is so much better than other products like Constant Contact. We can easily segment and send communications by graduating class, location and more. The Engagement Snapshot is also a very useful tool — we can easily see how engaged our alumni are.

Nachteile:

No complaints so far! We have thoroughly enjoyed our time with the Almabase team so far.

Successful three-day giving event using Almabase

Kommentare: Our institution successfully leveraged the Almabase platform to execute our seventh annual spring giving event, and our experience was overwhelmingly positive. Overall, we would highly recommend Almabase, especially for Raisers Edge customers who have struggled in the past with settling giving day data.

Vorteile:

-The interface was very easy to use to build our giving event site -Our donors enjoyed the giving experience, including the functionality to share the campaign, the tribute wall, the page layout, and the ease of giving -Reconciling the gifts in Raiser’s Edge was as easy as it’s ever been for us - the process of matching the gifts to the appropriate records made this a very smooth process for our gift processing team. -The clear and supportive customer experience was unmatched. We had regular meetings to discuss our project; and questions were resolved quickly. -We were impressed with the go-live support - the Almabase team was very responsive when issues arose during our three-day event.

Nachteile:

Tracking donor count and lack of joint gift functionality in tracking on the event page.

Exceptional Customer Service

Kommentare: Phenomenal! Customer Success managers are super responsive, will always have an answer or follow up with an answer, they have designed features to meet our needs, and have been great partners!

Vorteile:

Willingness to create new features to fit our needs.

Nachteile:

Nothing. I love everything about Almabase!

BFHS - Christy

Kommentare: It has been a very good experience, especially when we have issues. The team works with you until you have a resolution.

Vorteile:

All of the features available and tool for our alumni to engage.

Nachteile:

We have never used it to it's fullest capacity. One reason is because our alumni do not want to sign up for "another" platform to check.

Minnesota Independent High School Rates Almabase High for Online Fundraising Platform

Kommentare: Overall, we have had a very good experience with Almabase. We found Almabase provided the features we were looking for at a much more reasonable price compared to other platforms. The social influencer piece has been really helpful in advertising and growing our donor base. The use of social media helps us cast a wider net and we have had year-over-year growth. We also like the integration with Blackbaud as the donor information flows into the donor record once we sync our systems. This was a really helpful attribute and produced a much cleaner tracking system for our database manager.

Vorteile:

We really like the Almabase platform and have used it for three consecutive years. Our office is limited in size as we are a relatively small fundraising unit but the Almabase platform has given us a robust system for online fundraising within our community. We use the software primarily for an online giving day. This year, we generated nearly $700,000 with 650 gifts. The platform helped us show real-time totals, map gifts into our CRM system (Raiser's Edge/Blackbaud), acknowledge donors, and track progress. The system is easy for administrators to use and allows the user to upload photos, videos and customized text. The customer service with Almabase is outstanding. Our service representative answered our questions and provided on-going support throughout the campaign. There is also a tech team to assist with engineering and website issues. Overall, Almabase was the best value when we compared our needs with other platforms on the market. We primarily use the online fundraising function but we may consider add the alumni community tools in the future.

Nachteile:

Although we are very happy with the Almabase software we wish there was a way to securely use Venmo during a campaign. This is likely a function of using BBMS as our payment processor and integrating the two systems. We also tried using Paypal but the functionality with BBMS was not there. Hopefully, that will be corrected in the future. We also had a few gifts that were missed even though the constituents were mapped ahead of time. This is an issue we are working through with Almabase. Finally, it is worth noting that at times, we were limited on the template and form customization options.

Wonderful Almabase team and great product!

Kommentare: Overall experience has been very positive, especially the face to face help when encountering website questions. Thank you, [SENSITIVE CONTENT]!

Vorteile:

It is really easy to generate a mass email to send out to alumni, whether it be a fundraising campaign, event announcement, or alumni newsletter. There are also many design features available to be able to include links, photos, videos, etc. It doesn't take too long to build out new tabs or pages on your website, and Almabase provides so many resources for help, such as online articles and tutorials. Almabase also provides face to face help via Zoom. Shoutout to [SENSITIVE CONTENT], in particular, who has been fantastic and invaluable in every facet of helping us with our website. He is always available via email or Zoom to explain any user issues, solve website-building problems, or recommend new ideas for better engaging our alum in an accessible way.

Nachteile:

There are some areas of the software that are not user intuitive, but the Almabase team is always available to help with any issues that might come up. It is also a challenge to have alumni consistently update their profiles, so it is helpful to remind alum to update their profiles in every email sent out on the platform, with links to the login page.

Almabase platform and customer service is everything I was looking for!

Vorteile:

When I became the alumni relations coordinator for Thomas Aquinas College, I immediately began searching for a replacement for a print alumni directory. This platform exceeded expectations in that it provides the directory service that I was looking for AND provides a full service engagement platform for all facets of alumni relations. From emails to events to chapters and more! Most of all though, the team at Almabase is 110% top notch. They are personable, responsive, and complete. Whether I have a question on hot to best use some functionality or have a suggestion from my users regarding improvements on the platform, the Almabase team is always helpful, thoughtful, and responsive. This customer support you enjoy speaking with!

Nachteile:

There is little not to like. For myself, wearing multiple hats at our institution makes it difficult to use the product to its full potential. Also, our users are interested in sharing their directory information with each other, which is not a default setting. However, support has been very responsive regarding this feedback and we are working towards a solution. In all, I am very happy with the product and so are my users.

A brilliant tool to stay connected to the roots of alma mater

Kommentare: IMPRESSED is the word. I have started using this product since my under grad school introduced this to us one year after we graduated. Though I was apprehensive initially about it being just another variant of linkedin, I was proved wrong pretty soon. The sign up was pretty simple with the option of connecting with Fb or LinkedIn. Also, the profile was always synced and up to date. This is a simple, no-nonsense, to-the-point software which does what it says - "Alumni Management". There are no other strings attached. With the graph search(remember the facebook searches which go like "Who are my friends studying in California and are single?") and the various filtering criteria available, looking up for someone from my college is just a breeze. Also, masking of personal email ids put my fears of spamming to rest. The newsletter I receive from my college admins every month through this portal, brings a wide smile across my face along with a flurry of memories.
Well, the depth to which this software goes in finding the alumni is also pretty excellent. I was amazed to find alumni from even the early 1960s. Also, at my post grad, I got an opportunity to be part of the audience where AlmaBase was pitching. Boy was I surprised !!
<Tech Alert>
They implemented Machine Learning which took some seed data of alumni and used that to pull the details of other Alumni from Social Network spaces.
Also, the ease with which the alumni site can be customized is very good. Supported by a strong back end, the majority of look and feel is made up of pluggable components. It's totally up to you to decide how your alumni site would look like. </TechAlert> In short, having a strong alumni base is a low hanging fruit ignored by most colleges and this software solves the problem spot on. I do not see any major shortcomings, except that I wonder how'd they support the product with the size of the team they presently have. P.S: The total time they usually take to get the site up and running is around 7 days which is pretty cool !! :D

Great Team, Great Service!

Vorteile:

The platform is easy to use and customizable for our needs. We use the platform extensively for creating events, fundraising pages, creating alumni directory and posting news and updates for alumni. Almabase team provides great service and is always available to answer our queries and helps us navigate through the best options for solving our requirements.

Nachteile:

We have most of the features we look for in an alumni engagement platform. A mobile app would have been a nice addition so members have easy access on their phones.

Great for Communication and Alumni Management

Vorteile:

We love the emailing feature - especially the ease of design. We can tailor every email to our brand and what we want to communicate

Nachteile:

Integrations are a little clunky and it doesn't easily merge already verified profiles. Lots of duplicate cleaning by hand

A very good experience

Kommentare: I am very satisfied with Almabase.

Vorteile:

It's very easy to use and the platform is very friendly. The costumer support is very good and fast. They really work together with you. What deliver and provide what they set out to do. If you don't have time, experience, team to work with it is a very good start point in order to connect and engage your alumni network.

Nachteile:

There is no much. One of the things is that the platform is very good but the design is limited in somehow. You cannot change the design and specially, the structure, of the homepage. The changes available right now is the colors, fonts and the header/footer. When they are able to let you free to create your own structure and design of the page, it will be amazing!!

Outstanding alumni database and giving day products

Kommentare: Great customer service. Took a real interest in our needs. A rep visited with us for several days to see our operations in action and gain a better understanding of our needs.

Vorteile:

The Almabase team provides outstanding customer services. Alumni database features are similar to products provided by other vendors, but we particularly like Almabase's communication/email features. Almabase created a day of giving website for us that amplified the results of our day of giving. Over 1000 donors gave close to $250,000 in a 24 hour period. The site handled the giving volume without delay or error and provided instantaneous updates.

Nachteile:

No major concerns, some features we would like to see enhanced - for example, adding the capability to have notices scroll automatically on the site.

Giving Day Solution Helped us Reach Highest Levels of Giving

Vorteile:

Almabase is very intuitive to learn and easy to use. We recently tried the giving day solution for our alumni outreach. We achieved our highest level of alumni engagement and giving ever. However, the best part of Almabase is the loyal Customer Success team. Their support was above and beyond industry best practices, and they truly felt like part of our team in achieving institutional success.

Nachteile:

While the solutions are very easy to use and set up, they offer limited range of custimization. Though, this is not without merit, because these solutions have been set up for success backed by data. Also, their limited customization options were not unlike those found at other providers.

Great product!

Kommentare: Great experience! If i could rate over five for customer service i would!!

Vorteile:

Working with Almabase has been a great experience for us so far. They are very responsive when it comes to any questions that we have, whether it is via phone call or email. Right now I have monthly phone calls scheduled with our immediate rep and he is continuously working to help make things better for us.

Nachteile:

There isn't anything that we have found to dislike!

Small school that uses Senior Systems

Kommentare: Like I said above, we are saving a lot of time filtering out groups and specific people for mailings and emails. The communication has improved greatly and we are excited to bring more alumni to the platform so that they can start benefiting from Almabase.

Vorteile:

The ability to communicate and filter specific groups or people is literally as easy as a few clicks of a button. The amount of time we are saving by using Almabase to reach out to our alumni is immeasurable. We are still new to Almabase and are learning new things all of the time. As we learn more, we are more impressed and excited about our decision to use Almabase.

Nachteile:

This software does not "talk to" Senior Systems, so it does make it difficult when information is updated on one platform. However, Almabase made a point to visit our school to see how we use Senior Systems and is going to try to find a way to communicate with it. They may not succeed, but they care enough to try.

Love Almabase!

Vorteile:

Almabase has been such a great improvement for our Alumni Engagement as a small school. It provides great resources and benefits for our alumni, while allowing us to track engagement in ways we were never able to before. We especially love the communications center and events module.

Nachteile:

It's difficult to find cons of Almabase, as the team is always working on and releasing product improvements. I've been very happy with the product for our use.

Great Product!

Kommentare: The overall experience has been great! We love the product and the Almabase team has been there every step of the way to help us get the most from the product. I would definitely recommend this software to other schools.

Vorteile:

The Almabase platform is fairly easy to use for a non-technical person. It is a great way to quickly be able to connect with your alumni base. The team at Almabase is fantastic. Their customer service is second to none!

Nachteile:

We just recently found that we could not set up a pledge form where users could set up reoccurring gifts, however, I am sure it is only a matter of time before the team adds this functionality to the product.

It's been an excellent tool for day to day to Alumni management services.

Vorteile:

It's very user friendly and helps keep up to date Alumni contacts, who are notified of the latest events and updates on Campus and help interact with other alumni and students.

Nachteile:

They have been very quick to answer any queries. Their customer support is excellent! No cons that I can think of. I have been using it every day and its very rare we come across a glitch which anyways is taken care of immediately.

Great Product, Great Service

Kommentare: We use Almabase as our primary means to communicate with our alumni. We also pitch it to our alumni as a way for them to find one another and engage on their own. Every week through Almabase we send 1-4 emails to various alumni and have at least one event registration active. These areas are the ones we use the most, and Almabase has been great.

Vorteile:

Almabase is user-friendly, easy to learn, and the customer success team is always quick to help us with troubleshooting or even adapting the platform based on our needs.

Nachteile:

There are few parts of the event module that work fine but could be more convenient, but Almabase is already working on adjusting these. Honestly, any issue we have is quickly looked at and updated, and we so appreciate their willingness to adjust their platform when necessary!