CRM Database comparison—Your thoughts on them and the final verdict (Beacon, Donorfy, Raisers Edge and ThankQ)

Hi all,

I'm looking at a new CRM database for a medium sized charity in the £1-5m income range.

So far I have narrowed down a shortlist of potentials and wonder if other people have been using these (or have switched between them) and what their thoughts are on them (also any pros/cons from your experience)

My current list is:

These are all cloud-based, have decent fundraising features and reporting capability and varying capability for integrations (e.g. with JustGiving, Facebook etc)

They also are 'managed services' which is important so that IT functions (updates, changes due to the law - such as when GDPR came out) are all managed by the provider rather than in-house. Existing CRM is CiviCRM which while capabile and feature-rich is not a "managed service" so requires project management and technical skills to manage on an ongoing basis.

I'm interested in peoples thoughts and whether they have changed from a different provider, then what the pros/cons were.

Thanks!

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Donorfy was selected after comparing all of the above 4 options. This met the requirements we had set out at the start of the project but also scored well on the following points.

FEATURES: Donorfy is a fairly 'compact' system in that it has a lot of features, but a focus on the core features of small-medium charities. This makes it less customisable that some products but the upside is that you will only need a "Database Champion" (Keen to learn and use system) as opposed to a "Database Manager" (Strong technical and project management skills) which can be advantagous because of the lower learning curve to entry.

Donorfy integrates with Stripe and GoCardless for donations (low cost fees, about 1% at time of writing) and with JustGiving. It uses Mailchimp for batch mailings, but can use your Office365 or Google for one-off mailings from the system.

LEARNING CURVE: Because it is a simple/straightforward and modern cloud based system, the learning curve is much lower that some of the more complex or older systems. All common features are in a clear left-hand menu, your tasks and help centre are at the top-right and the main screen area is used for whatever your looking at; records, dashboards, activities etc. It is also responsive which means that you can use it on a PC, tablet or phone and the screen dimensions adapt well.

Because there are third-party tools like Mailchimp, remember to factor in the learning curve for these too! There is losts of introductory material on YouTube for these add-ins as they are already well established in their various fields.

IMPLEMENTATION: Donorfy use partners to do your onboarding and data migration; we used DonorCare solutions who have been very helpful (they do an onboarding pack which contains video-training and migration based around the amount of data you have) though as I'm from an IT background I'd prepared as much of the migration data as I could - the key here is to get your data out consistently (people/organisations, transactions, activities etc.)

TO BE AWARE: Donorfy has a one-to-one relationship between Activities and Constituents; CiviCRM does allow one activity to be connected with multiple people. I cnnot comment on the other systems with regard to this.

COST: Donorfy is a low cost solution; though the other solutions may not be massively different in cost depending on numbers of records/users held. Cost comes down to both the onboarding (one-off) cost and the software (annual) cost. All SaaS providers are more expensive that, say, CiviCRM however SaaS provides ongoing support whereas a solution like CiviCRM requires you to have an IT Team or contract out for IT support on an ad-hoc basis which can be a significant 'hidden cost' if you were to require ongoing changes.

While I would definately recommend Donorfy, I would equally be happy to work with any of the four I originally listed depending on the project and the requirements.