In general, although I am sometimes asked, I tend to avoid assisting clients with choosing a donor database package. Mostly because, although I actually know the field pretty well, it’s at the 10,000 foot level, rather than the 50 ft level that clients really need. And I know there are plenty of folks out there who know the field really well at 50 ft, and can step in with the best advice.
As a 10,000 footer, NTEN’s new Donor Management System Survey is of keen interest. There is, of necessity, a lot of overlap betwen CRM systems and Donor Management Systems. Many of the CRMs also show up here, although there are quite a number of packages that did not show up in the earlier survey.
In some ways, it is astonishing how many different donor management packages there are. In most ways, however, this is far from a surprise – donor management is a primary way that money gets funneled into nonprofits, and, unsurprisingly, organizations often spend significant dollars on their donor management packages.
By far the most popular DMS of the ones surveyed was … you guessed … Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge. 18% of users surveyed use that one, which also accounted for 35.5% of use in very large organizations. Others I think about: CiviCRM had 4.8%, Organizer’s Database at 3%, Salesforce was at 2.6%, Democracy in Action at 0.6% and MPower at 0.4%. I also have to wonder (shudder) how many home grown Access and Filemaker databases fall into the “Other” category of the survey, almost 20% of the total.
So how did people like these? They ranked the percentage of folks who would recommend a package. In a three way tie for first included two proprietary packages I’d never heard of: NEON CRM and Donor Pro. In that trio was Organizer’s Database, the desktop open source DMS. 4th (since there was a 3 way tie) was CiviCRM. Included in the bottom four are 3 properties of Blackbaud: Raiser’s Edge, eTapestry, and Kintera Sphere which was in dead last place. (iMIS rounded out the bottom four.) Salesforce was somewhere in the middle (ranked 9th).
What’s interesting is that they did a size of org and recommendation analysis – to break down recommendations by size of organization. Raiser’s Edge, for instance, did much better among large and very large organizations, and very poorly in small orgs (which probably shouldn’t be using it anyway.) The reverse was true of Salesforce. (The numbers aren’t always quite large enough for these to be solid, but it’s a great indication of what’s going on.)
What can we say about the open source packages? There are only three in this race: CiviCRM (web) Organizer’s Database (desktop) and MPower Open (client/server). CiviCRM and ODB were at the top of the pack in terms of popularity, reccomendations and grading, and MPower had very few respondents who used it, and it wasn’t included in the ones that were ranked. But its safe to say that these are good contenders, and did well.
Last but not least, the grading. Who’s going to get into med school? DonorPro and NEON CRM are at the top of the class, and will, I’m sure, get into Harvard Med. Donor Perfect, CiviCRM and Antharia’s On Deposit have solid A’s, and will for sure get in. There is a large group of packages, like Salesforce, ODB, Giftworks, that will probably make it, but they might have to settle for second tier schools. Raiser’s Edge, eTapestry and iMIS are going to have to get themselves into a special tutoring program, if they have a hope of making it. And Kintera Sphere, I think, is going to open a car repair shop.
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