DonorPerfect

Pros

There is so much to love about DonorPerfect. After 10 years in professional fundraising, working with everything from the most-known donor database to numerous smaller ones, DonorPerfect really is perfect. It's extremely intuitive, and extremely customisable. During my training, I was actually jumping ahead of my trainer, and ended up not using a full two hours of the training DonorPerfect provides. Furthermore, I was able to quickly and easily train others on how to use the database.

Cons

There was one quirk around using Tab, where it would skip a field near the top of the main Constituent page, then jump back up to it. I never did figure out how to work around that issue.

Pros

Donor Perfect is very user-friendly. The Quickbooks integration is vital. Constant Contact integration is a feature we never knew we needed.

Cons

There are some limitations in reporting that can usually be worked around in some way, but can feel like you're coding more than running reports. That area is less user-friendly for our older employees.

Pros

DonorPerfect has some good capabilities and is highly customizable. The software does a good job of tracking donors and volunteers and a decent job of tracking memberships. It has all of the money (gifts, memberships, in kind donations, soft credits, etc. in one screen that is helpful). It links accounts well. The SofterWare (payment processor) was fair, easy to use and do refunds, and was able to do minimal reporting. WebLinks (donation pages) are fairly customizable, there are certainly more updated looking forms out there but it was a very dependable and we were able to rename headers, and make forms for our unique needs. This is a VERY affordable product (our new one is double the cost) and you get unlimited constituents. The support is available, helpful, timely and great. The chat function was a lifesaver. If ever you were struggling with pulling a report, or how to customize something you could chat and they would tell you how to do it but they'd also just pull the report for you if you were in a time crunch. Their support was the hardest part to leave.

Cons

Our biggest con was reporting. We could run the same report (two different users) and not always get the same results. Each report was off by a few constituents. We left DonorPerfect because of this. When we did our data migration reports there were several constituents that were left off and we had to go back to our new system and manually put them in from DonorPerfect. It was the ultimate reminder that we had outgrown the database. We had DonorPerfect before it was cloud based and it was wonderful for our smaller database but as it grew in size that's when we started to struggle with reporting. Another struggle we had was as we got bigger we needed a more sophisticated stewardship platform for moves management. Bizarrely it didn't feel this was a focus for DonorPerfect, they tout having automatic processes but this wasn't entirely accurate. It was automatic, after you processed or did a few steps.

Pros

The integration with Constant Contact allows us to see whether a person is opening our emails (and create calculated fields based on their engagement) without having to log into Constant Contact. And we can still take advantage of Const Contact's good reputation, style templates and easy user interface.

I like that I can set up monthly donations within our system and the credit card data is stored there (securely).

There is a lot of flexibility in what you can do. The downside to this is the more you customize/deviate from the standard "donor only tracking" the less the built in reports will help you.

Cons

You can not find, sort, view and edit a subset of records within the database. We end up exporting most of our reports to excel, which is very counter-intuitive, takes more time and often ends up resulting in a lot more work as people edit the excel spreadsheet which then must be re-imported. The lack of this functionality is causing us to look around at other software.

It does not have a good way to manage households: they recommend putting spouses on the same record, and if one is a business owner (whose business gives separately), the business shows up as a duplicate record on many reports and must be manually removed. And I have no idea how they would handle it if you put spouses on separate records (so you could track their volunteer hours separately, for example)! How would their donations show up? How would you make sure they didn't receive duplicate mailings? If you were segmenting your database into 3 chunks (based on giving history), how would you make sure that the two spouses ended up on the same list?

The automatic download (from weblink forms) is very primitive--there is not a very functional de-duplication system that allows you to compare the records being added with what is already in the database. So as a result, you are likely to lose data or end up with lots of duplicates.

The calculated fields can be very powerful, but they are SO counter-intuitive. They do not allow you to create formulas using if/then terminology without having to create multiple calculated fields that interact with each other...and there is no way to group the calculations together so you can remember what you did. I wish they used standard formula protocol like excel and filemaker do.

Pros

One of the best features of this software is its user-friendliness. It takes almost no time at all for a new user to feel comfortable with it.

Cons

Doesn't always do exactly what I want, but then what does? Sometimes the periodic upgrades don't seem to make sense to me, or change things that were fine as they were.