Almabase vs Givebutter: Which is a better fit?

Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Camille. I'm the director of Alumni Engagement for Ranney School, and I would give Almabase a five out of five star rating. I haven't used any other alumni-specific software products prior to using Almabase, but I have extensive research and experience using other CRM systems, including Raiser's Edge and Salesforce. Ranney School decided to invest in Almabase software several years ago with the increasing need to engage and reengage with our alumni community. And it's been an initiative that we've continued forward, and the software has helped us tremendously. Almabase was incredibly easy and simple to integrate with our current organization. At first, all we had to do was provide an Excel list of all of our alums, and the partners in the backend at Almabase worked quickly to upload that information. As information is new or needs to be added, it's incredibly simple to do such thing. And what I appreciate the most is Almabase's ability to integrate with other softwares like Raiser's Edge. So our current database with all of our constituent information is easily connected with Almabase, so there isn't duplicating efforts back and forth. My advice to anyone considering Almabase is to definitely give it a look, go through the trial and understand its capabilities. And if you see anything that you wish it did do, definitely mention it to it because the developers are consistently making new changes and they value everyone's feedback. So I definitely think it's a software worth your investment.

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.