What do you like best about Bloomerang CRM?
Bloomerang has a simple, clean and intuitive interface that makes it easy for those who use it less frequently (BOD members) to quickly access information (and has a decent mobile app for on-the-go access). At the same time, it has powerful reporting capabilities with access to all fields from (almost) all report types and a great ability to roll up information. Since switching to Bloomerang we have cut our need to export and process data in Excel to about 1/4 of the time previously required. The main driving factor of our switch was Bloomerang's handling of households (we have many households where we directly interact with multiple members but we want to see overall combined activity and giving). Households can also include organizations, so accounts such as donor advised funds or IRAs can be included in the household, eliminating the need for kludgy use of soft credits and allowing proper automated acknowledgment processing. Customer support is still very responsive (although seems less so than when we started using the product and seems to be multi-tasking more often) and often investigates issues offline if they are more complicated (although, again, support seems less knowledgable than when we first started). The support ticket and request system has become almost unusable with a switch they made a year or two ago. Letter and email editing and management is built in, and while not as powerful as Word or MailChimp/Constant Contact, allow fairly easy creation of decent looking layouts. You can generate a template-based letter but then edit it (in program) before printing; that ability is NOT currently available for emails. All generated letters and emails are saved in the constituent timeline. Bloomerang integrates (somewhat clumsily but successfully) with Zapier, allowing us to automate our in-kind (food donation) processing - to better capture the data and send thank yous to donors in a more timely manner. Bloomerang has a decent task system for assigning todo items to Bloomerang users to assure follow-up thank you calls and letters are handled appropriately. Bloomerang has purchased other products since we started using it. They are slowly integrating the systems, and some of the integration is clunky. We use Qgiv for many of our forms now (they are much better than Boomerang's built in forms) and gala event. It is a little frustrating that there are significant additional charges for these "add-ons" when some of the functionality should be in the base product (but was poorly implemented in Bloomerang). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Bloomerang CRM?
Things to improve:
1. Better integration of Qgiv functionality, particularly in relation to constituent management and acknowledgements.
2. Conditional content in letters and emails. We have to create multiple versions of our acknowledgement letters to handle tributes (the tribute fields SHOULD resolve this as implemented, but will generate additional blank spaces if they have no content), DAF and IRA donations, and other cases. We update our letters and emails at least yearly, and have different acknowledgements for other campaigns so our number of emails and letters is out of control.
3. Report folders - this was implemented since we started using the product, but was done poorly and does not make it much easier to find reports, particularly for those that do not use the system frequently. Furthermore, all report editors can edit all reports (and you must save a report before exporting) making it easy for reports to be accidentally changed. Letters also either need folders or the ability to deactivate old letters (we use naming that will force the older version to the bottom of the list, but this is again clunky).
4. Poor handling of company accounts with multiple contacts (organizations are just treated as a special case of an individual). Custom fields are used across all account types, so individual-specific fields clutter up the organization account views and vice versus (simply making the sections collapsible would help).
5. Email tracking is very limited, with no roll up of information per constituent, no link tracking beyond the top 4, and no automated information added to constituent timelines.
6. Grant support is not included and their suggested system of tracking through Notes is very clunky.
7. Support ticket system is HORRIBLE after a recent switch. The feature request section is also awful (number of votes is limited, hard to find items) and it seems the they do NOT pay much attention to it (items sit in review mode for months to then be pushed to "not a priority"). While the system does roll out changes fairly frequently, the choice of the new/modified features does not always seem well-thought through and at times the changes seem to be negative for our use case. This is particularly frustrating when the costs of using the product keep going up fairly significantly (including a 1% increase in payment processing since we started). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
