Bloomerang vs Raklet: Which is a better fit?

Jennry R.: Hi, my name is Jenny. I'm director of Donor Relations. I would give Bloomerang a five out of five, and for more reviews like this, click below. Before we adopted Bloomerang, we were using a software that did not show a timeline. It was very difficult in donor relations to not be able to see what our giving history and interactions were with a donor year over year. It was not user-friendly for creating reports. It was just hard to pull information about individuals. We decided to go with Bloomerang because it does show a very clear timeline very easily. It's a very user-friendly system. People don't need a lot of training in order to know how to use it and it is much easier to do reports and much easier to see the relationships that exists among our constituents. We adopted Bloomerang seven years ago. It's honestly a little bit hard to remember what it was like to get started. I do remember that we adopted it right after we were completing an auction. Bloomerang really made it pretty easy for us. I don't remember that it was a particularly difficult process to be onboarded with Bloomerang. Then we were just good to go as soon as the new fiscal year started. We shifted over entirely to Bloomerang. Anybody who's thinking about Bloomerang, I would encourage you to call some of the Bloomerang references and just really talk to people about the experiences that they've had. I would also encourage you, if you're going to purchase Bloomerang, to go ahead and pay for the phone support. The technical support at Bloomerang is absolutely what I love the most about Bloomerang. They are nice, they are helpful, and they will stay with me as long as I need them to help me figure out whatever situation I have that I need their help with. This could be in creating reports or cleaning up individuals, how to send a particular kind of communication. They are super, super helpful. So for that, that is why I give Bloomerang a five out of five, just being able to call and speak to somebody who can help me solve my problems.

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.