Bonterra Guided Fundraising vs Givebutter: 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.

Melanie: Hi, I'm Melanie. I am one of the founders of Hearts for Honduras, and I would give Givebutter a four star rating. We used PayPal previously before using Givebutter, and what we found is it just really the cost of the fees was one of the big factors for us to look to change because we were going to get charged for every transaction. And so that was a big factor for us in finding something that passed on the fees, but a reasonable fee at that. Givebutter really is a platform that really supports nonprofits and does not charge us anything. So everything they do, we get to have a complete, basically a landing page where our participants can set up fundraising pages, we can fundraise for our upcoming trips, and also for our nonprofit in general. So just their overall support of nonprofits was a huge factor in being able to establish that, especially when you don't have very little budget to work with. So there is a little bit of a learning curve with Givebutter and just terms of playing around, how to set up your platform and set up your landing page. But once you get into the rhythm of it, it's pretty easy and it's easy to show others as well how to use. So that was a big... That's been kind of nice being able to teach our participants how to set up their own fundraising pages, but just a little bit of a learning curve when you're first starting off. So I would say that there's a lot of options out there. We did a lot of extensive research, compared the different platforms. Givebutter is right around the same in terms of the fees that they do charge for the processing of payments and fundraising dollars. They're relatively in that same ballpark of most. They're a little bit less. So that was a big factor. But really the big factor was the fact that there's no cost passed on to us to use the platform. So they raised their money completely through donations that donors make. So that was a huge factor for us in making that decision.