Donor Tools

The best CRM for a small budget...

Kommentare: I tell every small non-profit organization to consider DonorTools. For the price, you cannot find a better product, for a small shop on a budget.

Vorteile:

The price. The price cannot be beaten. For a donor management CRM that covers all the bases, and provides you all the necessary functionality to run a small development team, look no further. This has everything you will need.

Nachteile:

The reports that DonorTools can run are standard, but a bit limited for typical donor CRMs. Admittedly, you get what you pay for, but you can still want some Cadillac features, though you're paying for a Ford.

We use DonorTools for Donor Management in a small nonprofit.

Vorteile:

Ease of use, and modern interface are DonorTools strong points. I like the way it is so easy to setup the software; seeing income trends in the Dashboard compared to previous years is very helpful. It is really nice to have all our donor information in one place. I love that it syncs with MailChimp and so we have one organizational list of donors. Even though we are a small organization with 3 active workers accessing the information, it is so helpful that all the information is online and accessible to all of us independently and simultaneously from any computer no matter where we are in the world. Exporting lists are easy and very useful. For our small organization, the ability to setup fund pages for many different projects with boiler plate text is invaluable. There is no programming required and yet we have an easily accessible donor giving website with multiple fund pages available for our donors. It is really so simple that almost anyone can manage and maintain the donor management functions of your organization. Most of our donors probably do not often need or use the donor access functions, but it is very nice to be able to have these features without paying extra for the feature.

Nachteile:

Within the reporting functions (which are really quite good for the provide types of reports), there is a significant omission. It would be really helpful to print fund reports showing totals for a specific time period for all the funds. That just isn't possible with the current software. You can print a report on any ONE specific fund, but printing out fund totals for a year on funds is not supported. Either you must export data to spreadsheets and then produce the reports, or you can prepare reports on each fund and manually create summary reports. We have asked for additional fund reporting functionality, but as of yet this is not possible. DonorTools overall is an excellent program, but this one weakness in fund reporting is problematic. Our wish list would also include automated reporting to an email account, but that might be a bit much to hope for at this price point.

Useful, But Room for Improvement

Kommentare: I have been responsible for all entries on Donortools for 3 years now. I think the database is easy to use, however I do have a few suggestions that I think would make everyone's lives easier:
1) Donortools can not automatically connect to Constant Contact: I have to manually upload each new donor's name into Constant Contact in order for our donors to receive any emails from our organization. It takes forever to export the large donor list, sift through the newest names and then re-upload them on Constant Contact!
2) Work Addresses vs. Home Addresses: We have many individuals that we have both a work address and a home address. When doing an export, however, I can not just export "home" addresses. If I enter both the work and home address in the donor's name, and then happen to enter the work address first, I have to manually correct it once it exports on Excel so that only the home address columns show up. If I write the home address first, but also entered the "Company Name" they work for, that ends up exporting too. If I don't catch it, the Corporate Name will attach to their home address. When I have thousands of donors, this takes hours. Sometimes, I have thought to not enter in the work address altogether under the individual, and instead, enter their individual name under the Corporation-this brings up a whole other set of problems. Lets say my organization has a relationship with approx. 20 employees from the company that is entered in Donortools. At first thought, I would enter in all 20 names under the Company's entry, including their email addresses. However, when doing an export, the Excel spreadsheet becomes HUGE and doesn't separate the individual employer with their email-it is all in the same row. Let's say I find one of the employee's home address but didn't remember that I already entered their email in the corporate entry- Donortools does not automatically connect that person already entered with their separate home entry. When doing an export, I end up getting duplicate names because some people are entered under the Company as well as their personal entry...this requires much time to fix this if we have to do a big mailing, i.e.
3) Donortools does not allow me search by Donation $$ Amount: This could be helpful when determining how many donors have given $0 for a few years.
4)Pledges: Yes, I can enter in a pledge, but Donortools does not remind the donor to make their pledge once it's due. It's hard to remember all pledges.

Vorteile:

Easy to enter names. I like the "relationship" tab. I love I can use the "date Range" when searching for certain gifts. I like how my organization's PayPal account is automatically connected to donortools.

Nachteile:

1-Can't automatically connect to Constant Contact 2-Pledges need to be improved, Donortools should remind the donor to make their pledge, or at the very least, let me/the administrators know. 3-There have been double entries in exports of individuals: if we enter their home address in a separate entry and also their information under a company name...Donortools doesn't automatically connect this person together.

Incredibly simple, cost-effective tool for managing our donors.

Kommentare: The benefits to me have been making it easier to manage my organizations relationships with its donor base.

Vorteile:

I love the simplicity of Donor Tools. So many donor management packages (or CRM packages in general) are so feature-rich that their complexity makes them problematic, and not cost-effective, for smaller organizations like ours.

Nachteile:

Often a piece of software's greatest strength also informs its weaknesses. In this case, there are a few social integrations I would love to see happen. Also, cleaning up data is a huge task, even with a relatively small database. We have, on occasion, needed to clean up records, merge duplicates, etc. A slightly beefier data scrubbing toolkit would be nice. Finally, handling households, couples, families...these are things that are important to us, and we do it with tagging. That's okay, but it feels like something that should be a central feature to a software package designed to manage information about people.

The program has allowed us to utilize the basic needs for donor documentation.

Kommentare: The ability to be able to track donors anywhere with online access.

Vorteile:

Provides the opportunity to view a donors history donations over several years. In addition, the opportunity to classify each type of donation.

Nachteile:

We would like to be able to send out an email notification for receiving a donation. In addition, the ability to print labels directly from the program and not having to export to ACCESS.