Keela vs Pledge It: Which is a better fit?

Doug L.: Hi, my name is Doug. I'm president of a nonprofit, and I would give Keela five out of five. We tried a number of programs over the past few years for tracking fundraising. They included programs like CiviCRM, which of course is like an open source thing, DonorPerfect, Bloomerang, Salsa Engage, and Salsa CRM. Honestly, the list is long and my bad reputation around here if we're trying to get people to try new programs, unfortunately is well established. In all those programs, I'll have to admit things seemed either convoluted, slow, old-fashioned, disjointed, disconnected, and when we would talk to the customer service, if it existed, and if we could get through to them, we would get sometimes responses like, "Well, we're really busy on that." "Yeah. We're working on that. Or just, "You guys don't get this, do you? You Don't understand." It seemed like no matter what program we tried, honestly, we can never find a good fit. For some reason, on the night that I found Keela, I bet I had gone through, and I'm not exaggerating, 200 different platforms, 200 different vendors. I mean, I tried everything from Blackbaud and all the way through to all these salesforce kinds of solutions. And with most of them, they required me to ask for a company demo. And I'll just be honest, I don't know why that turned me off. It's like I felt like I don't need you to hold my hand. Just show me what your program does and then let me pick. I don't want some kind of a hard sell tactic. I don't want to wait till 10:00 AM in the morning to do it. I don't want to book something three days from now. I'd like to find something right now. That was probably midnight and I was frustrated and ready to give up, and suddenly I found Keela. They let me look inside of their program and see a demo, all online without having to be handheld by some sales person that was going to try to talk me into something. They let me open up an account so that I could actually start playing with the program. And this was all online and automatic. By 1:00 AM, I could see that this software thought like I think. And I knew if I could get it to think like I think that I could talk our other staff here into embracing as well, because by now we knew what we needed. This is like several years on. And I suddenly found a way that I could open up the account and actually pay a credit card fee and start using the real thing. By now, it was probably 1:00 AM or 1:30, and all of a sudden I found I could start importing things. By 2:00 AM, I was up and running, already using Keela. And I think by the time they got up the next morning, I had imported most of our data at least in a first run into Keela. Honestly, it just let me run and I love that. I love that idea. I'll be honest, my first import wasn't exactly perfect. I think by the time I was done, I had found seven or eight different sources where we had spreadsheets or old database files. This was a convoluted mess. I was bringing in stuff from Bloomerang from years ago, I was bringing in things from Salsa CRM and Salsa Engage, because they have you separate it into two different platforms for who knows why. I was bringing things from spreadsheets. This was not easy. But what I loved about it was, when I did run into some problems, I could call and I could talk to a person. I could e-mail and people wrote me back. Usually the same day, usually within three hours, I would get an answer back. So I decided to be honest with them, I said, "I messed up this import, but fortunately I tagged it. Can you help me reverse that?" And in a matter of a few hours, they wrote back and said, "Now let me understand what you want us to do, you want us to pull this tag out?" They let me completely go back and roll the time machine back and redo that import, and after I did it, it worked perfectly that time. I understood better how to import. Later on, I exchanged emails again with the support team and thanked them and they said, "Honestly, you're making our job easy. We normally would do this first import for you. You know that." And I said, "Honest, there are too many sources. This is too messy. I don't want you to have to mess with it." And they let me. They didn't like pat me on the head and make me feel like they had to hold my hand. They let me experiment with it. And boy, I feel like I made friends with them and the onboarding process went exactly as I would've hoped. When I think about Keela now, I think it helped bring together all those different sources into one universe. And now when we look, there aren't six different versions of one person's name. Everything is finally unified. So if you are thinking about going to a fundraising software, my suggestion is sure, pick whatever product you want and then compare it to Keela. I think you'll find that it's probably more affordable, I think you'll find that they give you more power for the same amount of money, I also think you'll find that they listen to your suggestions better. I want to be honest with you. I have been ruthlessly forthright with this company. I will literally say to them sometimes, "Does anybody in your company actually use this? Have you noticed that when you click here, you can't go back to there?" And when they write back, they don't become defensive. They don't start just giving me silence and not answering. They write back and they say, "You know what? You're right. It should have never been that way. Give us a chance to fix it." Three weeks later, and I'm not joking, they'll write back and they say, "We really think that you are going to like this next release." And I'll think is a form letter. So I'll look in the details and they will have the exact fix that I complained about. And after this happened several times over the last five months, I finally just wrote to them and I said, "You guys don't seem to get defensive or mad at me for suggesting things." Here's what they wrote back. They said, "Doug, everybody in our product development team knows you by name. They know you by name because they know that you're actually trying to put our product through its paces. And what's more, we want to set up a chance for you to talk to our vice president of product development and our CEO, because both of them want our product to work for a guy like you." They literally set up a Zoom conference with their head of product development and the CEO, and I've never had anything like this happen before. And for one hour, they pumped me for questions. There were no sales things to get me to upgrade or try to get me to buy something more important or bigger or more expensive, they honestly just asked me for real customer input for an entire hour. Was a great conversation because that very week we had just done our first try add an email campaign using Keela. Our past email campaigns had been 2,500, 3,000 addresses, we had typically raised by God's grace, maybe $10,000 or $11,000, which I thought was great. Using Keela, we were able to do completely within Keela 9,000 emails. Not with Mailchimp, not with anything outside, it was all built into the program. Out of those 9,000 emails in a brand new mailing. Now keep in mind, we'd never written this list before because this had never been a list before, 17 people unsubscribed. That's all. When we looked at the engagement of those 9,000 people, we were shocked. Over 50% of those 9,000 people opened our fundraising email to them. Over 50%. They tell me that average is like 25% or something like that for nonprofits. Double that, open that email. I'm being completely honest with you here. When we got to $70,000 in that fundraiser, I wrote Keela and I said, "I would've never believed it. You guys said we would increase our output and our input. Now that I see this happening, I wonder how is this possible?" And they called me back and they said, "That is an incredible response. I mean, we say you'll get a good response, but that is incredible." We are now at $100,000 in that campaign. I'm telling you sure, pick whatever product you want, then compare it to Keela and you will not regret it.