Bonterra Guided Fundraising vs Raklet: Which is a better fit?

Melissa: Hi, I'm Melissa, executive director of Townspeople, and I would rate Bonterra as a five out of five. Before Bonterra, we were using Salesforce, which just was not user-friendly for what we needed. It required too much the customization and development. We wanted something that was more intuitive and Bonterra met those needs. We chose Bonterra because it was incredibly easy to set up. The team that was assigned to us was super friendly and approachable and accessible. It's really easy to use and also very affordable, and we're a small nonprofit, so that was huge for us. Getting started with Bonterra was incredibly easy. I've looked at other systems before and they project out two months implementation, and we were ready to go in less than a week. They mapped out all the steps for us and were willing to hold our hands through each one, and it integrates with a lot of the systems we already used. And so, it was easy to complete those integrations and watch the online trainings and make sure that the teams were all ready to go to use it. My advice for anyone looking to check out Bonterra would be to talk with their customer service and their team. They're very open to talk to you about whether the product will work for you based on your needs, and they're really honest with us, and I appreciated that. I've talked with other systems that try to talk down about other systems, and they weren't like that at all. They appreciated the good and what everyone has to offer, and really we're trying to make sure whether they were a good fit for us. So that went a long way for me and for Townspeople.

Dave: Hi, I'm Dave. I'm the founder and principal at Watermark Business Partners, and I'm using Raklet to put together a community for my clients and partners. I give these guys five stars, because the functionality is really, really strong for such a cost-effective and reasonable entry-level platform. I'm excited to get this in place and really impressed and encouraged by what I've seen so far. So as far as other alternatives, I think the one piece that I'm using elsewhere is the learning and online course digital content component. So for that right now, I am looking at Easy Course. Also, I use sessions for my online meetings and bookings, webinars, all that kind of stuff. So I think there's an opportunity here to maybe bring some of these tools together into one place, but for me right now, from a directories and community component, I think Raklet's a really good, easy to implement, robustly solutioned starting point, and I like what I see. So for me, I chose Raklet because I'm new to this. I've never built something like this before. I'm not someone with a tech background. I come from a big corporate, a former banker who is new at the entrepreneurship thing and is even worse at technology. So as a newbie, I couldn't justify a big investment, but at the same time, I didn't want to go with something half-baked to the market. So I thought their pricing approach and value proposition was really reasonable. I don't mind commission payment on payment processing. I think that's fair. But some of the other bigger guys out there, like Brilliant Directories is another example that I considered, some of them are quite expensive, and I need to get comfortable before I can justify that investment. And right now with Raklet, I think it's a great place to start and really, really reasonable. I'm not fully. I haven't deployed the tool yet, but from an onboarding perspective, they do have fairly strong community supports and resources available online, so I've been impressed by that. Some maybe take a little bit of digging to find online, but that's, I think, often the case with just put anything. There's more than I probably expected and perhaps more meaningful, the tool is sufficiently easy to use, that I haven't found myself looking for help very often in the first place, which is really the key. So my number one recommendation for others considering Raklet would just be to really go through all the learning material first, and I think the onboarding process will be a lot smoother. There's a lot of great content there, and I found that even though I was able to figure things out for myself as I went, I think it would have gone a lot faster if I had taken the time to look at their resources, because they're really impressive and shouldn't be taken for granted.