Bloomerang Reviews

Pros

This product is characterized by accuracy in the analysis and management of all areas available within the institution, really wonderful.

Cons

Contrary to what is positive in its use, it cannot be negative

Pros

Intuitive and fairly easy to use. Integrated services with emails and email newsletters. Report system very good. Donations directly populated into donor profile, creates new profile for new donations. A time saver.

Cons

There is no address label feature or a way to directly print an address and name to an envelope.

Alternatives Considered

Constant Contact and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Choosing Bloomerang

They were state of the art two decades ago. Old and clunky features not updated to modern needs, poor customer service.

Switched From

Panorama

Reasons for Switching to Bloomerang

Similar features but with lower costs. Not corporate oriented.

Pros

My team was not tech-savvy, so Bloomerang was easy to use and explain to my supervisors.

Cons

Bloomerang's features were pretty inflexible, so selecting features for a report became a fight. There is also limited opportunity to customize the fundraising pages.

Pros

Great out of the box, easy to learn CRM. Love the integrated email system that does almost as much as MailChimp. Reporting is SO easy - you don't have to have a strong understanding of queries, etc. - you just have to understand the concept of filters. Integrated Wealth Research, while limited, is also great.

Cons

Not the most powerful system, but it has what you need as a small nonprofit. Cons are worth accepting for the ease of use - it means employees will actually use it!

Pros

It is super easy to use and it does everything I need it to do. The chat help function is also very helpful and responsive. If I ever run into a problem, they usually have an answer for me within a few minutes. Definitely the best CRM I've ever used.

Cons

We had to create our giving form in another software as the form offered through Bloomerang was not ideal and didn't offer a lot of flexibility or visual interest.

Alternatives Considered

Neon CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Choosing Bloomerang

The database was complicated and also was really two databases as we had to do some things in "web view" and others in "database view". It was just complicated and somewhat antiquated and we needed something that was functional for our needs.

Switched From

Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT

Reasons for Switching to Bloomerang

Bloomerang had the features we wanted most and a price that fit our budget. It also integrated with other platforms we were moving into, such as QGiv.

Pros

It was very user friendly! It doesn't take a lot of technical knowledge to dive in and start using the platform.

Cons

The data migration from our previous platform was tedious and lengthy, but I don't know how that could have been avoided.

Pros

We switched from Donor Perfect to Bloomerang for the ease of tracking groups and creating reports that are custom to our organization and couldn't be happier!

Cons

We did have some issues with converting Households over to Boomerang. This was due to the way we used Households in our old CRM.

Pros

I absolutely love how easy it is to customize Bloomerang to fit our needs. There aren't a million different products and service packages that you have to juggle to use your donor data. Reports are super easy to build. Donor acknowledgement is really as easy as a push of the a button!

Cons

We do have some issues with formatting emails and letters that we're working through. I also don't like that you cannot apparently schedule reminder emails for tasks or assign multiple responsible parties for tasks.

Pros

Bloomerang is one of the top products I refer out to my clients. The product is easy to use, powerful, and the customer service is extremely proficient especially compared to other similar database companies.

Cons

The only thing I'd like to see in the coming years is more integration support for complex fundraising shops. Bloomerang offers a number of integrations, but sometimes they are difficult for the end user at the organization to effective implement.

Pros

Able to use it remotely. Reports are very easy to create.

Cons

App not as fully functioning as the computer versio.mn

Pros

The switch to Bloomerang was caused by the need for our non-profit to begin utilizing new technology to track not only communication, but honors bestowed, event attendance and registration, and donations. I can say Bloomerang does a great job with all of these things! The ability to add custom fields to a constituents profile allows for necessary unique tracking and plethora of donation tracking types allows us to keep up with the growing ways in which donors engage with us.

Cons

I would like to see a more customized homepage for constituents. Total sum of all transactions is obviously important, but ability to see a summarized view of their contributions to a multi-year campaign would allow to increased ease to our employees. I would also like to see either an Outlook Plugin or 1-on-1 mailing software with template's saved directly in Bloomerang. Each donor can have a slightly different message or details, so having that ability to pull a template and customize before sending (without having to go through MailChimp's webpage and pulling report) would make a huge difference.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud and HubSpot CRM

Reasons for Choosing Bloomerang

Need for advanced metric tracking and centralization of information

Switched From

Microsoft Access

Reasons for Switching to Bloomerang

Mainly price

Pros

The web-based interface is fantastic. The evolution of flexibility and email marketing agility is not growing as fast as our organization's ability to maximize it. But, at this price point, Bloomerang has proven to be a very useful mechanism for volunteer engagement, donor development and stewardship, and for developing reports to enable us to better steward our donors and increase the number of donors overall..

Cons

Bloomerang is a little clunky. As we have gotten better at using it, our end-user satisfaction has lowered. We know more and want to be able to do more. For example, navigating in and out of email templates and copying and searching for past templates used is slow and multi-step, requiring back to the beginning navigation. Online forms development and email creation are somewhat "clunky".

Alternatives Considered

Flipcause and Bonterra Guided Fundraising

Reasons for Choosing Bloomerang

Gift works was not web-based and limited our staff access to information.

Reasons for Switching to Bloomerang

ease of web-based access and user interface were big reasons!

Pros

Once we got it set up, Bloomerang is easy to use and makes it easy to keep up with our donations and donors. The Dashboard feature is helpful because it shows our retention rate and new donors immediately.

Cons

The integration process was a nightmare. We had been using Quickbooks and Salesforce. When they were combined we ended up with thousands of duplicate constituents. Bloomerang was not able to filter those effectively for us, and we spent weeks going through thousands and thousands of accounts to clean up our data. We really didn't feel we got the support we needed during the integration process. There are some email features that we wish we had with Bloomerang, like personalizing in the subject line and auto-responder. We've also had times when two different employees will contact customer support and get two different answers to the same question or will get an answer that proves to be incorrect. We haven't been able to do single entries for donations--we still have to enter in Quickbooks and Bloomerang. I feel like there are things we could do with Bloomerang that we're not doing because we don't have a highly technical person on staff to figure it all out.

Pros

Bloomerang is very easy to learn to use and takes donor’s payments

Cons

Their customer service was okay. Not bad

Pros

In my last job we used Raisers Edge which is an amazing product but was much to much for us. Bloomerang is completely right sized for a small to mid-sized organization without a huge or complex development team.

Cons

I would like the more control over the merge functions and I this this is on the product development list.

Pros

I received a great customer service when I had challenges in using Donor Management software. The customer service team was so helpful and very polite and gently in guiding me through the whole process. Right now I am using it without hiccups! Kudos to Bloomerang team

Cons

The software is at first difficult to use and intergrate in my line of work but as I was taught by the team, now it seems easier.

Pros

Ease of use, donor management, reports, letters, email

Cons

Due to its ease of use, there are some limits to functionality. Also when we purchased it their online donor landing page and monthly donor programs were lacking somewhat. I believe they have made some gains with this. We went with a third party that integrates with Bloomerang which works well.

Pros

Bloomerang is very user friendly as is the customer service. It a easy CRM to navigate and figure your way around with, which I really appreciate.

Cons

There are some things that I run up against which I would like different and I always want to know more and to learn more.

Pros

It helps a small non-profit like ours have the donor information like a much larger organization

Cons

Does not mail merge perfectly especially does not do envelopes well

Pros

The relationship management is very helpful.

Cons

Communication tools are complicated and can be hard to find

Pros

This is the fifth CRM I have used in my career and my favorite by far. The data migration was stress-free and well managed. The product is extremely user-friendly and intuitive and the reporting capabilities are top notch. It's saved me a ton of time over my last CRM in terms of mailings and being able to segment my lists. And whenever I have a question, the online support is very responsive.

Cons

I wish it integrated better with some other services (like Mailchimp and Word). I have created workaround but just being able to import to those would be a lot easier.

Pros

As someone relatively new to our organization and to the field of development, I have found Bloomerang easy to use. I've heard horror stories about learning to navigate CRMs, and none of those have held true with Bloomerang.

Cons

I wish it had an option for connecting with donors through text messages.

Pros

The ease when donors donate through platform to record their giving history. It is a very user friendly platform (with the exception of building reports) and was pretty easy to figure out.

Cons

There isn't an option to create thorough donor profiles that we could use for larger campaigns. I also would love to see an option for to create reports with any detail we would like to add.

Pros

I am a fundraising consultant who utilizes a nonprofit client's Bloomerang software to assist them in development planning. I have had no training on the software and minimal utilization of support. Bloomerang is intuitive and has been easy to use for someone who would not be considered overly techy. I have used other more expensive (I know) and maybe more robust software, but for this client, Bloomerang seems to meet their needs.

Cons

My use is not in-depth enough to list negatives. I get in, look things up, maybe run a report, and get out. I don't post gifts or get into the deep workings of the software capabilities.

Pros

The interface is very user-friendly. I am the tech support person at the agency, but other staff has been comfortable enough to build reports on their own and manage the e-newsletter (mostly admin asst and development director). That takes a lot off of my plate; I only swing in for questions if staff ask, which isn't much. Staff likes generating the thank you letters right from the Bloomerang platform. Regarding the cost, it is a good value especially compared to other platforms. As a small nonprofit of 4500 households, we felt that we could justify the cost, which we choose to pay annually. We rely on Bloomerang for generating our mailing lists. We have two appeals, the fall appeal goes out to everyone. We are able to target our spring appeal to our most dedicated donors. We like the soft credit feature so we can track a person who brought in a donation on behalf of their church and the relationships feature so we can connect how donors are connected with other donors. We expanded the relationships list to faith/faith member, civic group/civic group member, municipal group/municipal member, housemate, academic in addition to family relationships. We use the secure embed donation forms, which removes our responsibility for PCI compliance for credit cards.

Cons

We still struggle with the report feature. We have no problem with simple reports, but some can get very complicated and we are not sure if we are doing them right. We always reach out to Bloomerang support to make sure that our info is drawing accurately on the more complicated reports. Usually these reports are staples, so once they are created, the user is good to go for all future use, except changing the dates of the report. We have become very resourceful in finding new uses for reports. We have had to get creative with how we do other things in the system - Bloomerang doesn't fit every nonprofit situation. For example, we use the Pledges feature as a billing solution for sponsors of our annual Holiday Lights drive-through display. We enter commitments as a 1, 2, or 3 year pledge. I can see room for improvement in the volunteer data collection options.