We think an educated nonprofit is a smart nonprofit, and that the smartest nonprofits choose the technology that best meets their needs. And that means that we want to give you as much information as you need to make the best decision for your organization.
A recent article we published offered a comparison of CharityEngine, Blackbaud, and EveryAction, and we got feedback that it was a helpful, agnostic document. It’s been politely but firmly suggested we keep the ball rolling, so here’s another installment of nonprofit CRM battlecards! As always, we will update these articles when there are changes in technology.
In this article, we will look at CharityEngine versus Salesforce versus Virtuous. As we said previously, this is based on the best and most updated information we can find. If anything changes, we will update the article.
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(Nonprofit Success Pack) |
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| Best CRM For | Small, Midsize, and Enterprise-Level Nonprofits | Tech-savvy nonprofits or those with a large IT team | Nonprofits wanting to integrate with many different technologies |
| Pricing | $$ to $$$ | $ to $$$$ | $$ to $$$ |
| Differentiators | |||
| Support for Nonprofit Products | Yes | No | Yes |
| Email Configuration Options | Shared Pool or Dedicated IPs | Shared Pool | Shared Pool |
| Natively Built Advocacy Platform | Yes | No | No |
| PCI and SOC II Status |
PCI Certified and |
PCI and SOC II Compliant | PCI Compliant |
| In-House Payment Processing and Billing System | Yes | No | No |
| Key Features | |||
| Email Automation | |||
| Payment Processing |
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| Events and Auctions | |||
| Text-to-Give | |||
| Advocacy | |||
| Online Forms |
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| Reporting and Dashboards | |||
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Sustainer/ |
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| Native Peer-to-Peer | |||
| CRM | |||
| CMS | |||
| Grants Management | |||
| Volunteer Management | |||
| Customers Say* | |||
| What They Love | "The tool is feature-rich. I find new options that will improve our productivity just about every week. One of my favorite features is their robust import tool. They make it so easy to bring data into the system.” | "We manage all of our donors, event attendees, volunteers, and any other human that's connected with our organization through Salesforce. We spend a lot of time cleaning up the database, and we devote a lot of staff time to Salesforce management in general, but we consider it essential." | "Virtuous has helped us to stay organized and to engage with our donors better." |
| What They'd Change | "CharityEngine offers a wide variety of features, but some have not been developed to the level of sophistication we need. The good news is they have an excellent process for submitting and reviewing enhancement requests, and so far, all our requests have been submitted for future development." | "It can do anything...if you can afford to pay someone a lot of money to set it up for you." | "The software runs very slowly without explanation on some days, taking nearly a minute to load certain pages or widgets. Reporting has some limitations compared to our last software. Customer support is very hit or miss." |
If you’re comparing these three systems, here are some questions you should ask the vendors:
One thing we remind nonprofits all the time: it’s about the ROI more than the cost. You need a system that will work for you, out of the box or through easy customization. And every vendor should sit down with you and listen to what you want, then tell you honestly if their system is what you need.
That’s what we do! If you want a no-obligation exploratory call, drop us a line. We’d love to chat.