Bloomerang vs Givebutter: 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.

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.