DonorView

Pros

DonorView is the fundraiser's fundraising platform. 1 spot for events, donations, pledges, etc. It's great!

Cons

The hardest thing is the training. It's not difficult, but you need to be able to do some self-directed learning or get help 1 on 1. It's intuitive, but takes a minute to understand the terms and vocabulary.

Pros

Everything is in one place. Setting up the events pages are fairly intuitive and easy to figure out. CRM is easy to use and has a lot of fields for information. Auction forms look nice.

Cons

Using the event check in and getting peoples cards swiped when they check in. Takes too long, had to do a lot of manual entries. Cannot get a total for each attendee on what they purchased during the event and we cannot see an itemized invoice. Very difficult to issue a refund because you cannot find where to do it. Too many options.

Pros

The program has many options. It's intriguing to have an all-in-one program for the price.

Cons

This program is not at all intuitive. Support is awful. We pay for a service plan, call support, and receive an email. It's much more efficient to email, but then the level of support depends on who is answering.

We have a three year contract. For two years, we've used the program for our annual fundraiser and auction. For two years, we've had multiple complaints from users, which I've outlined below. When I address them via email to support, I'm told that they will work on providing support but there is nothing they can do to remedy the problem.

Overall, the program requires MULTIPLE clicks to complete a task. At least 3, most often 6.

Here is the issue from our fundraiser this year, which is similar to last year's event:

We needed something to trigger that a recurring payment was entered incorrectly from a donor so we could stop that from happening. We also needed something that would tell the donor that they had set up a recurring payment and it was about to be taken out, so they could fix this before it even happened. Because neither happened, the donation was taken, and the donor was unhappy while we had to refund the donation, which took several days.

Related to our event and auction on Sept. 27:

Multiple issues logging in to the event module and the auction module. The program would just spin, and then not let donors in. Donors would try to go back into the program once they were in it, only for the program to tell them they didn’t have an account or their account wasn’t verified, but I sat with them to do the verification. This happened to our Treasurer; she’s familiar with how to use technology. She was so frustrated, she decided not to bid on anything. We had 5G internet; this was not an onsite wifi or local Internet problem.

Nothing to trigger a donor that they already had an account. People didn’t look at “Constituent.” That’s not language they use. We’ve now spent countless hours to clean up the database because people created up to 7 accounts trying to bid for the auction. I’ll relate this to the above problem that people would reenter information in order to bid.

There were no emails to participants and no texting to share that they had been outbid, so people didn’t up their bids. We needed that to happen.

People couldn’t complete bids or purchases once begun; the program would kick them out and they would need to sign in again, even if they had been signed in minutes before. Donors would come to us to ask for help, and we couldn’t see any notes or faults on our end as administrators.

Some participants received emails that they won when they were outbid in the last minute – there was a lag in the processing time in the program and the email went out. I closed the auction at 8:35 and sent out emails a minute or so later.

When donors would choose to Buy It Now, they would try to complete the payment, and it would not show sold until minutes later, or would show as remaining open. We would refresh screens and must complete the transaction for them. There were times where I would try to complete the transaction for them, and it would not complete. The Internet was active and on; this was not a case of poor Internet, once again.

Because our donors see Donorview as us, this reflects incredibly poorly on us and the quality of the event, in addition to discouraging bidders from participating. We’ve had multiple complaints about the use of the program, and some saying that we needed to change it if they would participate with us again.

Pros

Our team was quite impressed with multiple features DonorView has to offer when we first saw the Demo. Prior to switching over to DonorView, our organization used four software vendors to accomplish our goals.

Cons

So far nothing specific to report! The software has so many features that our team hasn't had any need to explore other features that may be relevant to other nonprofit organizations.

Pros

DonorView makes contacting and keeping our donors, sponsor and community members apprised of what our organization is doing easy. To have one system to handle donations, fundraising, volunteer times, sponsorships, grants, and marketing has cut down on the time we spend on just data entry alone. The ability to have a system in place where any staff member or board member can access all the information about what keeps the organization going no matter where they are at has proven to be beneficial time and time again. I am amazed at everything this system has allowed us to do and highly recommend it.

Cons

No system is perfect but DonorView is always looking for ways to improve the system based on recommendations from it's clients. The initial set up of the system was rather time consuming but well worth it in the end.