DonorPerfect vs Raklet: Which is a better fit?

Kathleen G.: Hi, my name is Kathleen. I'm a manager of community and alumni engagement at Foothills Academy Society, and I give DonorPerfect five out of five stars. So when I came into my role, I inherited our DonorPerfect software. However, I've been approached by multiple other organizations who do similar work. I have chosen to stay with DonorPerfect because of the high level of support that I get from the team at DonorPerfect as well as the extensive knowledge base and the overall usability and increase of efficiency for our work. DonorPerfect has been the choice to stay with completely 1000%. So the reasons that we chose to stay with DonorPerfect was it's created so much efficiency for us around the work we're doing with reporting to donors, as well as our own internal reports to track and check our data on how we are doing in our fundraising. It's also created a lot of ability through the integration with other platforms for processing golf tournament fees, golf tournament sponsorships and donations, as well as our... What am I thinking of? Oh, as well as all of our financial components. It's just... and the online form section, it's just been an absolute dream to use and really easy to use and really easy to adopt. So we have stayed with it because it's the number one choice. It was so easy to onboard and integrate with DonorPerfect. We elected to do training to increase the capacity of our team as we were all new to our roles. Once we got started, we found it to be very, very easy to use, really intuitive, and the capacity of it as we've grown our team over the last 18 months has really proven a worthwhile investment for us. I think the recommendation I would have for other folks who are looking at using DonorPerfect is considering the offset of how much time you're currently spending maybe working with your data, maybe sending thank you notes to your donors, maybe issuing receipts, and think about how much time you could save if that was a really streamlined process. I would also really recommend considering this to an offset to a cost and an increase in capacity for you to do maybe more meaningful work in your fundraising and not just spending time issuing or printing receipts, and think about how it could really increase the capacity of your organization to have such an amazing, streamlined product integrated into what you're doing. And do training. And definitely do training because it makes the whole thing 1000% easier. It's worth that additional investment. I would say it 10X'd our ability with the product. So buy the product, pay for the additional training so that you're really capable and competent in it, and then watch how much easier it makes your life on the day to day.

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.