Is NeonCRM
the right fit for my
organization?

What is NeonCRM?

What is NeonCRM? Who uses it? Why should I consider it for my organization?

You might be asking these questions if NeonCRM is on your organization’s shortlist for new nonprofit database software. NeonCRM’s scalability and wide range of features make it a great fit for most organizations, but you still want to be sure that it will work for yours.

If you’re a current NeonCRM user, you might be wondering if you’re using NeonCRM to its fullest potential, and if it’s the right system for your needs.

Let’s explore answers to some of your most pressing questions.

What is NeonCRM?

NeonCRM is a cloud-based software suite for nonprofit organizations. Its core functionality includes a constituent relationship management (CRM) system, dashboards, custom reporting, events management, volunteer management, and email marketing tools. NeonCRM also offers tiered packages with additional tools including membership management, peer-to-peer fundraising, and online store functionality.

Who uses NeonCRM?

A broad range of nonprofit organizations use NeonCRM, from small to growing to established.

For smaller organizations, NeonCRM offers robust but easy-to-use tools to do basic tasks like managing constituent information and collecting online donations.

For growing and larger organizations, NeonCRM provides more powerful tools for prospect management, memberships, events, peer-to-peer fundraising, and more.

The diversity of features and scalability of the NeonCRM platform makes it accessible and effective for organizations of all sizes.

Examples of the types of organizations that use NeonCRM

  • Health, human services, and social service organizations
  • Associations and membership organizations
  • Arts, culture, and humanities organizations
  • Social justice and activism organizations
  • Religious organizations
  • Schools and youth services organizations
  • Animal and wildlife organizations
  • Food banks and pantries

Why is NeonCRM great for nonprofits of all sizes?

There are seven core NeonCRM features that make it a great fit for a wide variety of nonprofits.

  • 1. Fundraising fundamentals

    NeonCRM has lots of bells and whistles, but its core functionality provides full CRM functionality focused on user-friendly but powerful tools for managing donors and gifts, including:

    • Accounts management – NeonCRM accounts provides a holistic overview of a person’s association with your organization, from contact information to relationships to transactions and more.
    • Gift processing – With NeonCRM, you can easily track details of both online and offline donations, including honor/memory information, pledge tracking, and soft credits. You can also create campaigns, funds, and purposes to track donation sources and uses.
    • Prospects, grants, and activities – Prospects and Grants features are perfect for advanced moves management and grants tracking. System users can track key information about an opportunity pipeline, including solicitor, target ask amount, and status. With Activities, you can track each unique touchpoint with a prospect and set up reminders for follow-up.
  • 2. Seamless online forms

    As a cloud-based system, NeonCRM gives nonprofits powerful tools to collect data and allow transactions online:

    • Standard forms – NeonCRM automatically generates secure online forms for donations (including unique forms for specific campaigns), event registration, and membership registration. Each form can be customized to change label names, rearrange field order, and set required fields. For a fee, NeonCRM can update all of your organization’s forms to match your website’s header, footer, and styling.
    • Custom forms – With a drag-and-drop builder, system users can create their own custom surveys as well as custom donation and membership forms.
    • Payment processing – NeonCRM offers their own branded payment processing, which allows system users to view all transaction details, issue refunds, and view balances without ever leaving the system. Neon Payment Processing also includes e-check/ACH processing, allowing scheduled payments like recurring gifts to be automatically charged. NeonCRM also works with a variety of other PCI-compliant processors, including BluePay and PayPal Pro.
    • System emails – Automated, customized system emails like donation acknowledgements and event registration confirmations can be set to send to constituents when they complete a form.

    These online form integration tools let your organization efficiently collect and track data without having to do manual data entry from paper forms or accounting systems.

  • 3. Management tools

    NeonCRM is a full software suite for nonprofits that provides management and online tools for a variety of critical nonprofit functions above and beyond basic fundraising tools. Your organization may not need separate systems for things like:

    • Membership, including online forms, custom membership terms and fee structures, renewal options, family/corporate memberships, and an online membership directory
    • Events, including unlimited online event listings, online forms, custom pricing tiers, add-on and breakout sessions, conditional ticket prices based upon constituent segments, and custom reporting
    • Volunteers, including project-based volunteer signup with online project listings, applicant review, timesheet management, and group communications.
    • Online Store, including online cart, automated shipping costs using flat-rate or USPS-calculated costs, customizable product pages, product groupings, and discounts.
  • 4. Mission Control

    Mission Control is NeonCRM’s fully customizable dashboard system. Dashboards are personal to each NeonCRM system user, so each person can update their dashboard to show what is most helpful for them. Mission Control offers over 40 different widgets, including:

    • Key Performance Indicator (KPI) widgets – Available for both fundraising and membership, these widgets analyze your organization’s NeonCRM data to show how you’re doing on critical statistics like retention rate, acquisition rate, average gift, campaign progress, and more.
    • Line, bar, and pie chart widgets – These widgets provide live-updating, easy-to-read charts displaying information like year-over-year donation totals, forecasted grant revenue, and email campaign results. Users can also create their own pie charts that compares a selected set of data points.
    • Maintenance widgets – With maintenance widgets, users can easily track ongoing maintenance for things like mail merges, overdue pledges, and duplicate scans, and take action on issues that need attention.

    NeonCRM also comes with a set of pre-made dashboards with useful widgets for different system features like emails and memberships.

    While many CRMs offer widgets, NeonCRM’s widgets are particularly focused on meeting nonprofit staff’s day-to-day needs. The fundraising KPI widget, for example, utilizes 14 indicators for fundraising success identified by a collaborative study by the Fundraising Effectiveness Project.

  • 5. Workflows

    Day-to-day nonprofit management can include a lot of tedious, repetitive tasks. NeonCRM’s Workflows feature allows system users to automate these common tasks to save nonprofit staff time and energy.

    Workflows are extremely flexible and provide a wide variety of unique triggers (what sets the workflow into motion), targets (what accounts should be affected by the workflow), and actions (what should happen to the affected accounts) to choose from. Some example workflows include:

    • Send a reminder email to a donor 10 days before their pledge installment is due
    • Send a thank you email to all event attendees the day after an event
    • When a donation of over $500 is made, add the donor as a prospect and assign them to a system user
    • Add the Individual Type of Prospective Volunteer to constituents who complete the Volunteer Application form

    Workflows can even include up to 15 steps of if/then logic, so users can build complex, detailed workflows that handle unique cases differently. NeonCRM offers pricing options that allow a system to accommodate up to 50 unique workflows.

  • 6. Integrations

    NeonCRM offers a diverse toolset for nonprofits, but it’s likely that your organization will need to keep using other systems, as well. This can easily create data silos where critical information is spread across multiple databases, making it difficult to reconcile and analyze. With many CRMs, the only way to address this issue is through time-consuming manual data entry or reconciliation in spreadsheets.

    NeonCRM has made it a priority to make it easy to bring data into (and send it out of) the system via integrations. NeonCRM integrates with over 20 different platforms, including Quickbooks, Constant Contact, MailChimp, and Eventbrite. With these integrations, users can connect NeonCRM to their other systems, set up mapping and syncing options, and ultimately share data between NeonCRM and integrated systems.

    Each integration provides unique tools and data storage based on system needs. For example, with the MailChimp integration, users can utilize NeonCRM reporting to create a list of names, emails, and other data that can be sent to MailChimp with one click. After creating and sending an email in MailChimp, MailChimp will return statistics like open rates, click-through rates, and bounces to the appropriate NeonCRM accounts.

    NeonCRM is also connected with Zapier to allow users to create automated workflows and integrations with more than 1,000 different applications. For example, users can connect NeonCRM to Google Drive to automatically create a new activity in NeonCRM when a pledge form is uploaded to the Drive for that donor.

  • 7. Custom objects

    NeonCRM allows you to easily track standard data like contact information, constituent types, transactions, and activities out of the box, and it includes custom fields for tracking custom data points for your organization.

    But many organizations need their own unique data structures that don’t fit cleanly into traditional CRM systems. For example, a medical foundation may need scholarships or program applications. Often times, this data ends up being shoehorned into standard fields, or tracked across multiple systems. Neon’s Custom Objects allows organizations to avoid workarounds and data silos with unlimited, fully reportable custom data tables and fields.

    With Custom Objects, system users can:

    • Create custom back-end fields and layouts for data entry – Create your own fields, set them as required, and organize their layout in the back-end for easy data entry. System users can even create relationships between your new Custom Object and other areas of NeonCRM, such as accounts.
    • Create front-end forms to collect Custom Object data – Allow front-end users to add their own information to Custom Objects by creating customizable forms.
    • Run your own Custom Object reports – Like other NeonCRM modules, Custom Objects are available for reporting, so users can run summary and detail reports on Custom Objects data.

Further reading and other resources

If you are taking a deeper dive into NeonCRM and completing an intentional search for new donor management and fundraising software, check out these additional NeonCRM resources for more information.

What are my best next steps?

If NeonCRM makes your shortlist of viable software options, you will need more information to determine if it is a good fit for your organization.

Consider these next steps.

  • Identify your organizational needs – What do you need NeonCRM to do for your organization? Are some items higher priority than others? How do you need NeonCRM to interact with your website? Think through your organization’s day-to-day work as well as longer-term goals and identify how they align with NeonCRM’s tools and features. This can be as simple as a bulleted list, but it will help you understand your organization’s requirements for a CRM and how NeonCRM can support those requirements. Be sure to provide the resulting information from this task to your vendor before your demo, so they can address your needs in the demo.
  • Schedule a demo – A demo will be valuable if you have a vision of how NeonCRM will support your organizational needs. Take your features list into a demo. Be prepared to ask questions and gather the information you need to complete your NeonCRM software evaluation. Personalized NeonCRM demos usually last between 45-60 minutes, and depending on the outcome of the first demo, you may request an additional session for follow-up questions and topics.
  • Solicit peer reviews and references – Your initial research and the NeonCRM demo will provide one perspective on the software. Validate or disprove your initial impressions by soliciting feedback from peer organizations that use NeonCRM. Peer reviews and references are the best way to gather practical, unfiltered information about NeonCRM from primary sources. Current NeonCRM users will understand how to be successful with the system, what pitfalls to avoid (if any), and what they wish they would have known when they were in your shoes evaluating NeonCRM for the first time. Whether the outcome of peer reviews and references are positive or negative, the insight gained will be invaluable.