Bonterra Guided Fundraising vs Tithe.ly: 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.

Speaker 1: Hi, my name's Joe. I'm the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Jasper, Indiana. We've been using Tithe.ly for a few months now and everything that we've used with Tithe.ly, I would give them a five out of five. Before Tithe.ly, we used two different programs. We used Wix, which is a much more complex system to put a website together if you're not very technologically prone. And then we switched over to Faithlife, which was a good fit for us, but Faithlife unfortunately ceased operations and we had to find another fit for our website and Tithe.ly was a very good fit for that. It filled all the holes that we needed. It was a very plug-in play, but still built a very nice website and had backend features that were very helpful to us. We chose Tithe.ly first and foremost because it had the features that we needed. It has background checks built into the system so that we don't have to have a third party provider and keeps track of those things for us. It also has a built-in system to keep track of both our members and those who work on different parts of our ministry. The other part that is very nice about Tithe.ly is the built-in easy-to-use sermon loader that we don't have to mess with, we don't have to think about, and automatically builds that feed for us. And the final consideration for us was price. There are several other companies out there doing very similar things to Tithe.ly, but we felt the price point and what we needed from the system really was a perfect match for us. It was very easy to start with Tithe.ly. They give you two options to start with. You can either move your website or build your website fresh with them. We chose to pay a few hundred dollars so that they could just take our existing website and build it into their platform so that it really was a pretty seamless transition and doesn't look any different than it did the week before we had Tithe.ly. So on the outside, no one can even tell that we've switched providers and that was a very helpful service for us. We're very glad to have used it that way. I would say if you're considering Tithe.ly or one of the other options specifically catered to church websites and background that they're worth talking to, they're very glad to talk to you on the phone or on a Zoom chat and they answer all the questions that you're going to need to know. The final thing that I would say is, if you're looking for an all in one platform, they're the closest you're going to get as far as I understand, including giving website people, all of that put together into one package. It's really what made Tithe.ly a perfect fit for us.