Keela

What I like about Keela is that it has so many different purposes and can be used for more than just one thing. For example, I can use Keela to create a database for all of our contacts for our nonprofit organization. In addition to that, I can also create a donation page where I can track all of the donations that we recieve a create a donor profile, where I can report how much they've donated.

What I like least about this software is that it can be a little difficult to navigate at certain times. Everything seems to be hidden away under some tabs or menus. This is not a major inconvenience but it would be much easier to use if everything was organized and presented in a better way on the Keela website.

Keela provides all of the tools we need in one place. Not only can we manage all of our donors' information, interactions, and transactions, but we can also organize multiple donor campaigns, create various donor and subscription forms, send out all of our email newsletters and fundraising email blasts. Keela allows you to run just about any type of report that you can think of, set up multiple dashboards for monitoring various metrics, and gives us the ability to set up powerful multi-step automation sequences that can be triggered by various actions. Keela is very affordable and their customer service team is one of the best I've seen anywhere. They're very responsive and listen to their customers for new ideas, potential bugs, and much more. We are very satisfied with Keela and would highly recommend it to any other nonprofit that is looking for a DRM.

There is not much that I do not like about Keela because whenever I encounter a problem or limitation, I just contact their support team and usually get a response very quickly. Probably my least favorite thing about Keela is their mobile app. It is good but is just a little limited in it's functionality.

As a smaller charity we are most impressed with the integrated features on Keela. Being able to direct our donors to give online and know that they will automatically receive a tax receipt and thank you makes us very happy. Tax receipts are now branded and our charity is listed on our donors credit card bill. This helps tremendously with brand recognition! We are now able to save a lot in administration costs by no longer having to be dependant on third party processors. More importantly than money saved is the improved donor experience that we can now provide. We never have to direct our supporters to a third party to resend tax receipts, update credit card information, stop or increase monthly donation, etc. The BCC and FWD email features are a real time saver as well!

There are some features that need improvement to completely satisfy our needs but we find Keela always makes the effort to continually improve their product and is open to suggestions through their Ideas Portal. At the moment our biggest challenges with the software are: limitations in reporting, e-blast design features are limited and donor interactions are not able to be imported.

Keela's pricing structure was straightforward and fair. They didn't charge "by the user," like some vendors do. Yes, there's a sliding scale based on the range of contacts, but for our org, the scale seemed fair. We had tried numerous (I forget how many) products previously. I'm ashamed to admit we rarely stayed with one product longer than a year. DonorPerfect. CiviCRM. Salesforce. Blackbaud. Bloomerang. Salsa CRM/Engage. The list goes on. Not sure why - but when we found Keela (I'm not kidding), it was like finding "the one." For one thing, they didn't make me make an appointment with some sales rep that would do a 30-minute demo, then ask me if I had questions, even though I had already watched everything in her/his demo in dozens of YouTube reviews. (That's a crazy system, if you stop and think about it.) Keela let me open the account, set everything up, do my first imports, and start using the program all without having to wait on ANYONE in ANY time zone. (It's not that I'm anti-social. I just wanted to experiment with it on my OWN.) They advertised some outlandish increase we should expect in fundraising. I remember thinking, "Now how could they know that?" But I'm serious - from the day we first installed until the first email campaign, it was under 90 days. And our first email/printed mail campaign has just topped (you're going to think the company hired me to say this - but they didn't) $100,000 in income. Our typical email campaigns had been $10,000 or $12,000prior

I need a bigger box. (haha) I didn't like the way they seemed to want to hide certain fields from me - like, they were afraid it would make the software seem too complex. The reporting module seemed sooooo basic. I just wanted them to give me a "field picker" for every field and let me choose exactly which fields I wanted. Instead, someone in their product development team had apparently decided which fields that he or she thought were important enough to include in a report. What's so hard about giving us a dropdown box with choices -- ALL choices?! States and Canadian provinces were listed in a dropdown - but I had imported thousands of records with state abbreviations -- and, strangely, it wasn't an option to search for those. (?????) Again, it was like they were trying to make the program so friendly that they prevented us from graduating to more of a "power user" posture. The software was fast (I mean - we have 17,000 contacts and it seemingly always finds the desired contact within 1 second - seriously), but some of the clicks and steps between functions are dreadfully filled with twists and turns and dead ends. Too many clicks. They allow the user to manage importing - and they have documented it well - but I can't designate a "key field" that I want to use as the key. They have their own Keela index - but it's hard to assign multiple keys. They DO keep an "external index" and they use it - but sometimes I'm not clear how to mesh the two.