Neon CRM vs Blackbaud CRM

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Our analysts compared Neon CRM vs Blackbaud CRM based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Nonprofit CRM Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Neon CRM Software Tool
Blackbaud CRM Software Tool

Product Basics

Neon CRM is a cloud-based solution built by Neon One that helps nonprofit organizations streamline day to day processes for more efficiency and manage fundraising events, memberships and volunteers through automation.

Users can leverage it to build nonprofit websites while facilitating real-time credit card processing and recurring payments. These inclusions help enhance online donations while reducing manual work.
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Built on Microsoft Azure, Blackbaud CRM is a fundraising and relationship management solution, catering to enterprise-level marketing and fundraising needs. It helps streamline data and reporting processes, offering insights into every stage of the constituent lifecycle and increasing operational efficiency.

Capabilities include financial aid management, tuition management, advocacy, fund accounting, grant making, award management, direct marketing, data enrichment and more. It helps attract new supporters, facilitate communications according to unique preferences and grow mission impact.
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Product Insights

  • Central Dashboard: Leverage customizable widgets and automatic syncing for a complete overview of the activities across the organization. Track growth and retention across supporters and donations, volunteers and events as well as upcoming activities and campaigns in one glance. 
  • Enhanced Fundraising: Centralize donor data, segment it to identify prospects and solicitations, tweak communications and campaigns and raise more money. Customized online donation forms, automated follow up receipts and workflow post-donation also help build better relationships and subsequently get supporters to pledge more donations. 
  • Comprehensive Relationship Management: Comprehensive supporter profiles, constituent portals to manage donations and customizable online forms form the foundation of a relationship-focused system that fosters deeper connections. 
  • Integrated Communication: Along with donor segmentation, integrate mass communication through emails and social media, and build a brand with storytelling and interpersonal communication. 
  • Mobile App: Available on both iOS and Android. Makes it easier to review upcoming activities, stay connected to supporters and add new donations on the go. 
  • Integrations: Use certified integrations as well as open APIs to manage multiple tools and create a streamlined, intuitive system with data consistency across the organization. 
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  • Effective Fundraising: Users can handle fundraising programs efficiently by coordinating and streamlining multiple fundraising teams, and defining solicitation and stewardship responsibilities. It’s also possible to unite multidimensional relationships across different chapters, programs and field offices using scalable and intuitive solutions, and track progress using KPIs. Users can review trends, identify areas of opportunity, and develop strategies to improve performance. Fundraisers can also access or update important constituent information using mobile devices. 
  • Enhanced Communication: An integrated approach helps users understand and control multifaceted communication efforts. This lets them leverage data across multiple campaigns and drive higher outcomes. Team members can access required information using workflows, dashboards and communication tools that offer actionable insights. 
  • Strong Campaigning: It’s possible to strengthen direct mail programs by integrating marketing campaigns with constituent information. Users can identify high-performing donor segments, set budgets and gauge performance results in real time. 
  • Online Presence: A completely customizable CMS helps create a robust website that acts as a hub of activities and a platform to interact through forums, social networking and personal pages. 
  • Maximized Lifetime Donor Value: Users can increase the lifetime value of donors and replenish their donor pool by leveraging a nonprofit cooperative database. This helps them retain current donors, encourage lapsed donors to be active again and acquire new donors. 
  • Customized Solution: The customizable CRM platform lets users offer unique experiences and address different situations based on varied constituent needs. 
  • Managed Opportunities: Benchmarking tools help users identify opportunities and challenges so that they can manage those efficiently. They can also evaluate and evolve past strategies, compare performance, and share information across the organization to streamline operations. 
  • Customized Advocacy Solutions: Users can create a strong identity by optimizing and executing strategies. Integration with fundraising and marketing solutions helps users reach important prospects, influence decision makers, convert advocates into sustained donors and run effective cross-channel campaigns. 
  • Managed CSR Programs: Blackbaud CRM helps improve local community relationships, attract new talent and accomplish greater purpose by driving employee engagement, funds and volunteer hours. Using flexible volunteering solutions, employers can express social responsibility interests and passions as well as motivate team members with incentive programs. 
  • Secure Data: Blackbaud CRM follows reliable security measures to protect private financial information, being PCI-DSS level-one compliant. It follows the FTC's Red Flag Rules for preventing identity theft, uses 256-bit encryption through a VPN network for data transmission, and funds deposits in FDIC-insured custodial accounts. The platform offers protection against professional liability, cybersecurity, general insurance and employee theft. 
  • Transparent Grant Making: An integrated and customizable platform ensures maximum impact from grants as well as leverages financial integrations and intuitive workflows. With access to information from all philanthropic stakeholders, users can get a detailed view of outcomes, build strong relationships with them using communication tools, share impact stories and achieve mission goals quickly by reducing approval time. 
  • Data-Driven Solutions: Blackbaud’s target analytics solution lets users save time and improve ROI by optimizing fundraising and comprehending its effectiveness. They can connect with constituents through preferred channels, acquire new donors and advocates, inspire them to join missions, and understand their unique personas. 
  • Expert Consulting Services: Fundraising experts with years of experience in strategy implementation, modeling result analysis, long-term roadmap development and donor portfolio analysis offer consultations. They help identify industry best practices, suggest investment and implementation plans, and recommend tactical, project-level and strategic targeting. 
  • Accurate and Enriched Data: Users can get a holistic view of the database with updated information so they can understand how to connect with prospects, eliminating time and energy waste. The toolset enables users to acquire email addresses and phone numbers, send emails, identify suitable donors and their employers, and gather demographic information like age and gender. 
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  • Accounts and Relationship Tracking: Create and maintain donor accounts, along with a history of contact, communication and transaction receipts. Relationships between individual accounts can be traced and tracked as a household, company or custom relationship for better communication, campaigning and event planning. 
  • Activities and Notes Tracking: Keep record of all actions performed on fields including users, constituents, accounts, donations, pledges, events, memberships, communication and purchases to audit databases as well as track previous and current data states. Trace changes in data records and maintain priority tasks using the activity and notes tracking feature. 
  • Volunteer Management: Accept, train, certify and manage volunteers. Once trained, volunteers can be assigned to different groups and projects, and the progress of the volunteer program can be measured regularly. 
  • Grant Management: Track and manage research, apply to and receive grants, track statuses, and take the requisite steps to receive grants. 
  • Constituent Login Portal: Exclusive members can access timesheets and custom web pages. Constituents can manage peer-to-peer fundraising, events and recurring transactions, upload required files and renew memberships. 
  • Credit Card and Check Processing: NeonPay is a single-source, PCI-compliant tool to manage, authorize and capture payments from all major credit cards as well as eCheck and ACH. Make payments void, issue full or partial refunds and manage disputes. 
  • Event Management: Manage all types of events, ranging from get-togethers, seminars and classes to conferences and fundraisers. Also enables dynamic event listing, conditional ticketing and attendee management. 
  • Email Marketing: Segment members and customize communication per segment using in-built templates and graphics. Segmentation can also be used to create print mail and material that can be dispatched to physical addresses. 
  • Online Web Forms and Surveys: Offers customizable, mobile-friendly and responsive web forms for events, surveys and donation collections. The forms can be branded and have support follow up communication. 
  • Reports and Analytics: Tracks the performance and growth of the organization via statistical analysis. Access detailed reports on various features and aspects of the tool, such as mailing and communication, donors, memberships, donations, transactions and payments, events, campaigns, and more. 
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  • Analytics: Users can nurture lifelong relationships with customers, make informed business decisions and increase revenue with actionable insights into supporters’ behavioral, demographic, lifestyle and financial characteristics. It helps eliminate guesswork from prospect research. 
  • End-to-End Education Management: Blackbaud CRM helps students achieve their academic aspirations by equipping them with the right tools. It offers a host of cloud-based solutions for K–12 private and parochial schools. Features such as online committee review and self-scheduling help save time, while customizable admission checklists let admins and parents review application status. It offers school-specific functionalities such as filterable calendars, dynamic curriculum guides and more. 
  • Peer-to-Peer Fundraising: Blackbaud CRM helps grow a supporter base by discovering new supporters and empowering current ones. Users can engage them in campaigns and events using an optimized peer-to-peer solution portfolio. It helps increase funds and effectiveness using analytics, purpose-built capabilities, coaching and social networking. 
  • Integrated Online Marketing: Integrated solutions let users follow up with customers on a large scale using automated emails driven by behavior or predictive intelligence. They can create a customized, integrated website experience and connect with social influencers to increase social engagement. They can own complete constituent life cycles and synchronize data from marketing, advocacy and fundraising efforts. 
  • Simplified Financial Processes: Financial aid helps expand reach, receive award recommendations through reports and configure calculation settings. Users can collect priority information, design formulas based on enrollment parameters and policies, and submit timely applications and documentation. It saves a great amount of time on the review and verification process. 
  • Tuition Billing: Automated payment processes and dedicated customer support ensure a quick and seamless billing experience. Online account review and payment submission are available on different devices. Flexible payment options include credit card, automatic debit, check or money order, and cash payments. 
  • Streamlined Finance Management: This lets users maintain FASB compliance by tracking expense reports and governing user-specific access rights and approval controls. They can maintain clean account structure, manage reporting requirements and demonstrate stewardship of contributed funds by capturing program, grant and department information. 
  • Integrated Merchant Services: This feature improves efficiency using detailed reporting, 24/7 access to transaction information, pre-reconciled bank deposits and automatic updates of payment data. Users can mitigate fraud and protect sensitive organizational data by simplifying PCI compliance and leveraging Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE). 
  • Academic Role-Specific Capabilities: The solution supports assignments, grading, announcements, forums and more. It streamlines scheduling, attendance, report cards, grading and transcripts by collecting academic information. Parents can complete admission applications, accept enrollment contracts, monitor homework assignments and more. 
  • Effective Expense Management:  A secure online portal offers insights into vendor spend, allowing users to negotiate better rates. Users can leverage this to add cardholders, review activity with detailed reports, control expenses, and monitor credit card statements and audit logs for each card holder. 
  • POS Ticketing: Users can deliver personalized experiences through group sales, event pre-sales and automated discounts. This feature helps increase ticket sales with dynamic pricing, identify trends and behaviors using integrated analytics, and save time and effort on program management and configuration. It’s possible to convert ticket buyers into members using a 360-degree view of behavior, and layered wealth and demographic information. 
  • Prospect Management: Through custom modeling, users can identify top prospects using likelihood and capacity scores, and prioritize them accordingly. It helps them approach prospects based on their interactions and relationships with other organizations and supporters. Users can also access and use modeling results in CRM and prospect research software. 
  • Direct Marketing Insights: Using direct analytics, users can minimize expenses by eliminating non-essential outbound communication and maximizing marketing communications. Intent-based targeting techniques let users capture untapped donation potential, identify suitable communication channels and determine the best outreach approach. 
  • Modeling and Prospect Research: Prospecting software evaluates data from over 100 compliant data sources using proprietary analytics methods. This generates four key wealth attributes including net worth, annual income, investments and discretionary spend. 
  • Awards Management: Users can enhance cross-functional visibility throughout scholarship and award management processes and create impactful stewardship practices. Students get a unique view of scholarships and can identify suitable plans. It’s possible to share impact with donors by combining fund financial data, key donor data from any CRM, thank you letters and other beneficiary information. 
  • Congregation Management: A connected app lets users manage things like unlimited online donation forms, one-time or recurring giving, member and family profiles, and a comprehensive church directory. It’s also possible to keep congregants informed using a drag-and-drop, intuitive email marketing tool. 
  • Church Management: Users can manage groups effectively using email and text communication, attendance tracking and group leader permissions. Intuitive check-in capabilities help keep children safe and secure, while one-time and recurring events can be managed using event capabilities. Visual tools provide insights into trends. Users can also generate lists and reports, and keep data up to date using built-in data health tools. 
  • Volunteer Management: This feature lets users track general and role-specific requirements for volunteer positions, store background checks and track interest so that they can match an enthusiastic volunteer with appropriate needs. 
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Product Ranking

#13

among all
Nonprofit CRM Software

#28

among all
Nonprofit CRM Software

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 722 reviews
Good User Sentiment 84 reviews
87%
of users recommend this product

Neon CRM has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 722 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

74%
of users recommend this product

Blackbaud CRM has a 'good' User Satisfaction Rating of 74% when considering 84 user reviews from 2 recognized software review sites.

4.4 (5)
n/a
4.3 (185)
n/a
n/a
3.71 (42)
4.4 (516)
3.7 (42)
4.3 (16)
n/a

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Customizable Interface: Neon CRM offers a high degree of flexibility, allowing users to tailor the interface to their specific workflows and preferences. This includes customizing data fields, reports, and dashboards to align with unique organizational needs.
Comprehensive Fundraising Tools: The platform provides a robust suite of features designed to streamline fundraising efforts. This includes online donation processing, event management, grant tracking, and donor communication tools, enabling nonprofits to manage all aspects of their fundraising activities efficiently.
Membership Management: Neon CRM simplifies membership management with features such as automated renewals, member directories, and communication tools. This allows organizations to effectively engage with their members and foster a sense of community.
Reporting and Analytics: The platform offers comprehensive reporting and analytics capabilities, providing valuable insights into fundraising performance, membership trends, and program effectiveness. This data empowers nonprofits to make data-driven decisions and optimize their operations.
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Robust Functionality: Blackbaud CRM is praised for its wide range of features, including donor management, fundraising campaign management, grant tracking, and detailed reporting, making it a comprehensive solution for non-profit needs.
Data Management and Analysis: Users appreciate the software's ability to handle large datasets, generate insightful reports, and provide a comprehensive view of donor interactions, enabling data-driven decision-making.
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Limited Customization: Neon CRM offers some configurability, but users express frustration with the lack of deep customization options, especially for complex workflows or unique data tracking needs. This can lead to workarounds and inefficiencies for nonprofits with specific requirements.
Reporting Challenges: While Neon CRM provides reporting tools, users often find them cumbersome and lacking in flexibility. Generating custom reports or extracting specific data insights can be difficult, hindering data-driven decision-making for nonprofits.
Usability Concerns: The user interface, while generally clean, is sometimes described as unintuitive and clunky, leading to a steeper learning curve for new users. Navigating through different modules and functionalities can feel disjointed, impacting user adoption and efficiency.
Integrations: Although Neon CRM offers some integrations with popular tools, users report limitations and challenges with connecting to their preferred applications or services. This can create data silos and hinder seamless workflows across different platforms.
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High Cost: Blackbaud CRM's pricing can be a significant obstacle for smaller nonprofits, potentially diverting funds from their core mission.
Complexity: The software's intricate design can overwhelm users who aren't tech-savvy, leading to a longer learning curve and potential frustration.
Customer Support Concerns: Many users have reported issues with Blackbaud's customer support, citing slow response times and unhelpful interactions, which can be frustrating when needing assistance.
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Neon CRM stands out for its robust reporting capabilities, allowing users to generate insightful reports on various fundraising metrics. This feature is particularly valuable for organizations that rely on data-driven decision-making. The software's ability to track donor interactions and giving history provides a comprehensive view of fundraising efforts, enabling organizations to identify trends and optimize strategies. Additionally, Neon CRM's customization options empower users to tailor the platform to their specific needs, ensuring a personalized experience. For instance, users can create custom fields to capture unique data points relevant to their organization. Neon CRM is best suited for small to medium-sized nonprofit organizations seeking a comprehensive fundraising solution. Its user-friendly interface and intuitive design make it accessible to users with varying levels of technical expertise. The software's affordability and scalability further enhance its appeal for growing organizations. While Neon CRM offers a wide range of features, some users have noted that the learning curve can be steep, particularly for those new to donor management systems. Additionally, certain advanced features may require additional configuration or support. Compared to similar products like Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud and Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT, Neon CRM offers a more cost-effective solution with a focus on ease of use. However, it may lack some of the advanced customization and integration capabilities of its competitors.

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Is Blackbaud CRM the "black sheep" of CRM software, or is it a "baud"acious leader? User reviews from the last year paint a mixed picture of Blackbaud CRM, a comprehensive CRM software designed for nonprofit organizations. While many users, particularly larger organizations, appreciate its robust functionality and in-depth reporting capabilities, which allow for sophisticated data analysis and donor segmentation, others, especially those from smaller nonprofits, find its complexity and high cost prohibitive. For instance, one user lauded Blackbaud's ability to handle large datasets and generate detailed reports, which are essential for tracking fundraising progress and identifying donor trends. However, several users criticized the software's steep learning curve and the need for extensive training to unlock its full potential, making it a daunting prospect for smaller organizations with limited staff and resources. A key differentiating factor of Blackbaud CRM is its specialization in the nonprofit sector, offering features tailored to fundraising, donor management, and grant tracking. This niche focus is a double-edged sword. While it caters to the specific needs of nonprofits, it also means that organizations seeking a more general-purpose CRM might find Blackbaud's feature set overly specialized. Some users praised the software's grant tracking capabilities, highlighting how it streamlined their grant management process and provided a centralized platform for tracking applications and deadlines. However, the recurring theme of high cost and poor customer support left many users feeling frustrated and underserved. In conclusion, Blackbaud CRM is most suitable for large nonprofit organizations with the budget and manpower to invest in training and support. Its comprehensive features, powerful reporting, and industry-specific tools can be invaluable for managing complex fundraising operations and large donor databases. However, smaller nonprofits with limited resources might find its cost, complexity, and customer support lacking. For these organizations, more user-friendly and affordable alternatives might be a better fit.

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