Keela

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

Reasons for Switching to Keela

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

Reasons for Choosing Keela

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Keela

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

Reasons for Switching to Keela

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 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

Reasons for Choosing Keela

Reasons for Switching to Keela

Pros

I love how easy it is to tract monthly giving and yearly renewable memberships. It really makes my job so much easier and less stressful. Emailing made easy and contacting members simplified. Everything is one place and I am no longer concerned of anyone falling through the cracks.

Cons

Honestly I can't think of anything I don't like.

Pros

We love how easy it is for people to learn the system. New staff are up and running on it effortlessly. The customer service is also stellar. The team really listens to our needs and helps us find solutions.

Cons

integrating our email provider with Keela's email function was difficult and managing unsubscribes has sometimes been a challenge.

Pros

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!

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Keela

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Keela

Pros

We are very new to the software, so our focus so far has been on data entry and setting everything up and developing convention for entry to ensure consistency.

Cons

We would love to see the ticketing software that integrates with Keela. We have been using TicketPeak and it is not a simply process to ensure we are accurately capturing contact info. One system for our CRM, fundraising and box office would be ideal.

We would also like there to be a way in which we can issue tax receipts for each of our two charitable organizations without having to pay for two separate databases. They are essentially the same contact list, but donations are made to either or both organizations. It would be great to find a solution to this within just the one database.

Pros

It was fairly easy to switch from our previous CRM database that we were unhappy with. This software has given us the ability to communicate effectively with our donors, keep track of sponsorship pledges, and track our yearly fundraising goals. All of this has been easy to customize to our organization and add the custom fields that pertain to us.

Cons

To be fair, it's hard to be a "one size fits all" for any product, so of course there could be things that could be enhanced or added. For us, I would like to see when a pledge payment is past due and be able to create a segment or report that could show who is behind and by how much. Also, I would like the ability to create custom reports that would allow custom queries. The nice thing though about the Keela team, is they REALLY listen when you have a particular need like I just mentioned and they provide an Ideas Portal for just that!

Pros

The price point is REALLY amazing for very small, young charities. For the functionality, Keela offers huge bang for our buck. My charity Board love that Keela are specifically aiming to help small charities like our grow our capacity. Switching to Keela has allowed me (the ED and sole staff member) to streamline our work flows and automate a bunch of things (like tax receipts and donor thank yous!) that were taking up a lot of my time.

Cons

One thing that bugs me a lot is when someone uses the contact form that is embedded into our website I seem to need to click through several layers in Keela to actually get to their message (notifications > contact > interactions > contact form > message). It'd be amazing if somehow those messages were easier to access - it took me a few goes to figure out that I need to look up "interactions" for a contact, and not "emails".

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Keela

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

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

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

For the most part it is user friendly, and doesn't require a lot of training to pick up
Creating an e-bulletin/mass communication is fairly straight forward and easy to do

Cons

The reporting tool is still being worked out so it can be not too much info, and a bit more user friendly, the one area that is less intuitive because it's just hard to remember all the steps as there are many ways to access data.
Also wish you could "undo" in the communication section when building an e-bulletin

Pros

User friendly and very easy to use. I love how you can customize your own widgets

Cons

You cant really set up how things are stored or how to pull reports

Pros

The whole site is simple and easy to use. It's very well organized and even customizable to our needs.

Cons

There aren't any issues we have with Keela at all.

Pros

Before Keela, we had all of our contacts on various spreadsheets. Now I am able to find our donors, communicate with them and allow new volunteers and donors the opportunity to get involved as well.

Cons

I wish there were a simple option to collect simple information via a form without the donation links.

Pros

-Easy to onboard donors and volunteers (the difficult part was organizing the data to make it upload properly which has more to do with the administration of the organization that the software.
-Immediate, flexible training for the staff.
-Relatively simple interface. I say relatively because sometimes its almost "too" easy and some members of the staff overlook the simple solution.

Cons

-I am not fond of the analytics tool. Again, maybe this has more to do with the fact that its too simple, but as an analyst I find it difficult to get the information I want easily.
-We have had some struggles with the integration with other vendors-specifically MailChimp. After following all the instructions for both companies, we still cannot complete a good link.

Pros

I like that this software doesn't seem to overwhelm you with features and 'bells and whistles.' It does everything we need it to do, in a simple and digestible way.

Cons

It recently underwent an upgrade to Keela 2.0. I liked the dashboard / format of the previous version better but it still works the same so I will adapt!

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Keela