Keela Reviews

Pros

Keela just works. There are very few times where it doesn't work as it's designed, and the system is quick, responsive, and reliable. They are quick to push out new features.

Cons

Nothing comes to mind - the things we were wishing for were solved within 1-2 years of product development.

Alternatives Considered

Zeffy and Blackbaud eTapestry

Reasons for Switching to Keela

It's a contemporary design with features that are developed more than free alternatives.

Pros

What I liked most about Keela is how intuitive and user-friendly it is. The platform is designed with non-profits in mind, making it easy to manage donors, track engagement, and streamline communications. The automation features save us time, and the reporting tools are incredibly insightful.

Cons

It's a bit of a tricky setup with Sendgrid, and getting support is very hard unless you pay for it.

Pros

When selecting a new CRM Keela stood out to me due to the fact that it is highly customizable. For our needs, this was essential and it has lived up to my expectations in this area where many other options would not have fit our needs. The forms are beautiful and easy to customize. I like that it integrates easily with Paypal and Stripe. From a donor experience perspective, Keela is a huge upgrade from our previous CRM which was very important to us and a big reason why we switched. I've also found the customer support team to be responsive and helpful, and they seem to be constantly working on improving the platform which I appreciate! It never takes long to get a response and they will work with you to support you as much as you need.

Cons

Surprisingly, Keela's basic functions are where it lacks the most. Accurate and easy to use search bar? No way. Intuitive reporting? Nope. Mobile functionality? None. I didn't even think to consider these features when making my selection because I assumed that all platforms would be at least decent in these most basic arenas and I was weighing the bells and whistles. Keela's bells and whistles are fantastic, but the basics are sorely lacking. I know it is a relatively new database so I'm optimistic that improvements will continue to be made.

Alternatives Considered

Bloomerang

Reasons for Choosing Keela

Clunky forms on The Databank made for a bad user experience. We also were not able to do much customization on our own. Reporting was accurate but not user friendly.

Switched From

The Databank

Reasons for Switching to Keela

Price

Pros

I appreciate that it is very easy to find information about individuals donors. The search function works the way I hope it should (put the name in and information pops up) and it isn't frustrating waiting for results. I also appreciate how I can quickly reach giving information for donors and see both recent and historical information without any trouble.

Cons

I would appreciate a Keela app for my phone. I do a lot of donor visits and if I was able to look up information on my phone for a certain donor, that would be incredibly helpful. Also, streamlining reports creation would be helpful. As the leader of my org, I don't do a lot of report creation but when I must do it, it gets confusing very quickly. I am not sure how to make this better but it seems like it could be.

Pros

The customer service, donor tracking, reports

Cons

Lack of donors being able to update their own payment info and track their giving history, as well as set reoccuring donations more specifically

Pros

Our [sensitive content hidden] liked the clean look of the interface, but beyond that, as the [sensitive content hidden], I have no pro and keeping the program is no sustainable because it glitches with credit card payments, usually in the clutch of a big fundraiser. I've had it with this program.

Cons

example: right now we're screwed by Keela. It stopped taking credit card payments in the middle of our fundraiser event. Totally unreliable credit card acceptance, Fundraising events need reliable links for donors, forms need to work without frustrating donors by rejecting all credit card payments. Our own tests of credit cards doesn't work. The form will work for awhile, and then we lose critical time and labor with all the calls that the link won't accept credit card numbers and we have to manually take payments. Its unsustainable.

Pros

Keela is easy to use right out of the box, and comes with outstanding customer support for any kinks you may not be able to work out yourself. Importing our old data and onboarding the system was painless.

Cons

Keela is currently lacking in good old-fashioned database functionality like linking consituents to each other and powerful list and query capabilities.

Alternatives Considered

CanadaHelps and Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT

Reasons for Switching to Keela

Keela was selected for considerations of cost and functionality

Pros

Keela has a relatively clean interface with lots of features. They are continually upgrading which is very nice to know that there is a team committed to constant improvement.

Cons

When there are issues, support is lacking and slow. Some of the integrations don't seem to work well and the payment portal, KeelaPay, doesn't work over 50% of the time.

Alternatives Considered

Zoho CRM, Salesforce Sales Cloud, HubSpot CRM and Blackbaud eTapestry

Reasons for Choosing Keela

Limited support and deteriorating functionality.

Reasons for Switching to Keela

It was in the sweet spot on price and features.

Pros

Being able to house all of our donors and easily communicate with them. Having a place to create forms for revenue and donations within minutes and share it out to the public. Processing fee cover option for donors.

Cons

Not being able to add stock/ quantities to revenue forms. Also formatting images to forms so that it looks professional and parts of the image aren't cut off.

Pros

Centralization of grant applications, donations, creativity,

Cons

Its time consuming when there are any trouble shooting.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Neon CRM, Trail Blazer Non-Profit Manager, Eleo, Bloomerang, Salesforce Sales Cloud and Donorbox

Reasons for Switching to Keela

Keela had the most functionality for the best price. So many features and functionalities integrated into one tool with a simple-to-use and intuitive interface. It was a clear choice for us.

Pros

It is fairly easy to do the basic functions on Keela.

Cons

I don't often have to pull reports, but when I do it is cumbersome and challenging. It is better than the previous software we used but I like to use the Tags to identify different groups of people and it takes a while to figure out how to do this each time.

Pros

The software is easy to use and has a number of features. The customer support is outstanding which is valuable because there are so many features.

Cons

The communications software and integration with the segments and tags can be cumbersome and requires more steps than other programs like mailchimp. However, Keela is constantly improving its offerings and we see these as minor compared to the benefits

Pros

Easy integration with multiple other tools related to email, events and accounting. We were very happy with the ability to upload our previously accumulated data through the import tools. Self Help documents are thorough and the Support team are responsive, clear and concise.

Cons

Soft credits and ability to report on both the initiator and the final delivery vehicle would be super helpful. Minor- but an ability to track any premiums distributed through some form of inventory capture would be great.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud, Giveffect and Bonterra Guided Fundraising

Reasons for Choosing Keela

Needed a more current look, feel and functionality to our daily system.

Switched From

Aegis CRM

Reasons for Switching to Keela

Keela fit our needs more directly and with less need for work-arounds.

Pros

Keela is extremely scalable, and AI-powered tools make sure that small teams don't have to waste their time on data-entry or meticulous report-generation. Keela has all the best stuff built in.

Cons

There are some minor UI issues that need to be fixed, particularly in the outgoing email tools.

Alternatives Considered

Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT

Pros

I like the fact that it is user friendly and that we can maintain all the information we need in one place.

Cons

For my purpose, I only deal with inputting donor information and processing receipts. I don't really use other parts at this time.

Pros

I like having everything in one place. I am fairly new to the software, but I am loving it so far and see the value in having this as a donor management system. I wished we would have invested in it sooner.

Cons

Exporting reports do not always work and I end up doing screen shots in the browser to do my presentations.

Pros

I loved the first point of contact with [sensitive content hidden] who walked me through the program and also showed me all the benefits, took time to answer my questions and worked with my budgetary constraints.

Cons

I have not had enough experience but would have loved to have the AI features included instead of being an add-on feature.

Pros

Since I am new in the fundraising world, the best part of Keela, to me, is the customer service. Within a day I usually get a clear and precise answer to my questions. They are always adding new features and are willing to improve based on customer feedback.

Cons

Not a lot of software seems to be easily integrated to Keela. For a small non-profit like us, it isn't an issue yet but that's the only con that I can think of.

Pros

The ability to communicate easily to our donors based on certain filters and specifics. Also, the ability to organize our donors into different categories and collect reports based on our overall status as an organization. I also love the ability to create separate campaigns and impact areas and link them easily to our website.

Cons

The communication forms/templates are rather basic and can be difficult to create a unique email to send out.

Pros

The accessibility of Keela was definitely a plus. Also, I appreciated the customer service when I needed help with the program.

Cons

The accessibility of Keela wasn’t completely applicable across different people - my colleagues had some trouble navigating the program.

Pros

Keela helps me to track fundraising contributions and provides reports that are user friendly and relevant to my organization.

Cons

The default report range often does not meet my needs but it's easy to modify.

Pros

Easy to use, start-up ease, good import process, easy export. It worked really well for me in one non-profit where I needed simple email blasts, to track donations, volunteers, etc. It has a nice automatic email form for donations and memberships. You can search your contacts easily by name or email, and tag groups easily. Tags are easy to organize. The old dashboard did a great job managing campaigns and tracking donations against the goal. For small orgs, this is a good basic starter tool for managing your contacts and interactions.

Cons

It's missing some things a more mature org needs. We're a neighborhood organization that relies on memberships. There's no renewal process in Keela at this time. You can't search by street name or address fields, so broadcasting to a group on a street is impossible. Sometimes we feel Keela gets 'tired' and can't find a contact we know is in there. So we refresh the browser, and lo and behold, there it is. The integration to mailchimp is weak, and unfortunately, Keela's email blast tool isn't as robust as Mailchimp, so we're forced to stay on Mailchimp. We've had problems with the quickbooks integration not putting funds into the right account.
The other problem is reporting. We find the tools not as robust as we'd like for reporting total membership sales data. We've also had to cancel a class of membership and redo it, and that jacked all our reporting for people who'd already taken out memberships under the 'wrong' class.
For a larger org with heavier membership management needs, this tool, wasn't as robust as we hoped.

Pros

Integration with our current business was seamless! We were up and running on Keela in less than three weeks. Keela offers all the functionality necessary for nonprofit management.

Cons

The only feature missing is a built-in events platform however, EventBrite integrates with Keela. We did not find any other software that offered all the functionality in one place.

Pros

Visually appealing: good use of colour to organize categories and make it easy to find, images that help identify what category has what information. I had A.D.D and so many websites or programs are so text heavy and overwhelming and everything is shouting at you at the page to notice it. This program is superior in its use and look.

User Friendly: I got the hang of the program easily. It is very detailed and easy to use. I like the fact I can email a volunteer and all the staff can see the email thread between us both. That is very convenient. My favorite is the interactions page. As I can see if there is a LOA posted, or if the volunteer only wants to volunteer in one program and not another. I am able to find out what is going on with the volunteer without reaching out to each one or calling a staff member as we all post our interactions in there. It saves me a lot of time and any program that can offer that is aces in my book

Cons

I wish Keela could create a software program for inbound and outbound calls. The program currently being used is "iCarol" which is a great program, however it would be great to have another software option. Once upon a time Bell was the only company to monopolize the phone industry...now there are several ...

Removing a volunteer: It is frustrating categorizing volunteer as "inactive" as they still show up with all the active volunteers, which clogs up the page. If you had a separate page as inactive (so they wouldn't show up with the active volunteers) that would make a MASSIVE difference. As volunteers honor their commitment and leave .. so we have A LOT of inactive volunteers with the active volunteer