The mind can only take so much of the illogical. When 75% of one’s time is spent trying to make connections between tasks and elements in a program as vast and as ill-conceived as Kintera, all one wants to do is nap. Instinctively the brain knows that putting so much effort into something inevitably fruitless is fruitless in and of itself, and therefore prefers to shutdown. My initial psuedo-optimism has passed (post).
It’s hard to argue Kintera’s benefit when you look at the numbers. My non-profit makes heaps off the relatively minimal investment in Kintera. Hard to argue until you factor in that data management and site traffic have very little to do with Kintera. Kintera’s function, at least in the capacity we manage to use it, is not unique. Many products such as ESX (site), Convio (site), and Blackbaud’s NetCommunity (site), could do just as well because in the end the tools provided are just tools. Granted, I’ve not used other services, but ours site’s traffic, this non-profit’s service, and the reasons why people donate have nothing to do with Kintera and everything to do with the quality and sincerity of this organization.
I think my company is trapped into thinking that Kintera is the only road to online donations success. I can’t explain their insistence on staying with Kintera any other way. In the end, Kintera only makes this company’s life harder. Its tools are difficult to use and its support is non-existent. Volunteers, constituents, and donations are practically manually managed since Kintera won’t speak to Raiser’s Edge with any competence. After my three-day training, the instructor who claimed a supporting commitment to all his students has never once responded to my emails. (I never even got the fleece promised me!)
At least I got some Silly Putty (info) from them. Do you know that the harder you throw Silly Putty, the harder it gets (demo)? That’s cool! At least Silly Putty makes far more sense (info) than Kintera.
Kintera is a lemon. There are options. Go with them.
Our organization started out with Kintera in 2005. At the first possible moment, we switched to GetActive. No regrets. It sounds like Kintera hasn’t changed much since we left (last December).
Kintera had its strengths, but the pitfalls didn’t make them worthwhile in the end.
Excellent blog, which I found via Beth Kanter! Well written, honest, and useful. How do you like Raiser’s Edge for the things you use it for?
I don’t have an opinion, but I am curious to see how well honed various vendor’s “listening skills” are … and see if they respond to your post!
Enjoying your blog
Hi Beth et al,
GetActive listening here
And with great clients like Judi at C3 spreading the good word, who needs advertising!
Tompkins
Techsoup was the first to respond to some confusion I had. I was very grateful for their attempt at clarifying.
Michael Stein has dropped by frequently. His company produces Members Only, a CRM/CMS service. Usually he’s just dropping by to say hello, but check out his personal blog. He is firmly involved in the non-profit tech sphere.
And now it’s great to see GetActive in the mix. I had not heard of them until Judi Sohn mentioned them above. Great to hear from you, Tompkins.
But that’s been the extent of vendor interaction on this site. I just hope the others are listening.
I mentioned this thread over at Netsquared today … let’s see if others follow. You should join the API discussion over at NTEN
We are RE users, looking to expand our web presence. I am looking for some opinions on NetCommunity, which is attractive to us because of the link with RE. We’ve been having a hard time getting information from users who have had longer-term experience with the product. I’ve seen some of the opinions over at http://reusers.server-planet.com/
Any ideas or suggestions? Other products to consider?
I completely disagree with your characterization of Kintera, for two reasons.
The first is that your RE data synch works fine with Kintera. We have had a daily synch for the last year and a half, without any problem.
The second is that I have found Kintera to have excellent Support. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it.
I’ve heard very few positive replies from Kintera users on these public blogs, and when I look at the company’s performance, I can see why client’s are complaining. If they’re losing millions every quarter, I suppose something has to give… unfortunately for the clients, it looks like the cutbacks are in support and product development.
I’m finding myself with more requests for info from people I work with, so anyone who is/was a client w/ more feedback – please tell me if this is true. I don’t want to steer someone that way only to see them lose support or lose their entire investment if this company makes more cuts.
I’ve been working with Kintera for a few months now and I agree 100%.
A question for Anonymous who posted on 2/9/07, if he makes it back here… What are you using for a daily synch? Did you purchase the service from Kintera?
As far as I can come up with that would be the only way to do it since they’re hosting my data and export functionality is so limited. For the life of me, I can’t do it through the front-end.
If anyone is interested, we’ve set up a listserv at the University of Michigan to discuss Kintera products.
https://listserver.itd.umich.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=discuss-kintera
I am a customer relations manager for ESX, Inc., and we are very pleased to have been mentioned here. The information discussed is very helpful, and I completely agree with the rationale presented by the author. Thanks for the WOM!
Kintera is awful. Our organization has been working with them for over a year and they are completely unresponsive when we need help of any sort. We use their CMS and hours upon hours are wasted trying to complete simple tasks that Kintera makes extremely complicated. I hate them and I cannot WAIT until our contract is up.
Kintera is fine. Raiser’s Edge and Kintera have no compatibility issues for my organization. Busting out some extra cash for dedicated customer service has, unfortunately, been key. Things were more bleak prior to that.
I’m a web designer so I’m always a little picky about the user experience. Kintera doesn’t have the basics down. I think this is the third year our Buddy Walk has used this software and they haven’t improved it one bit. Frustrating!!!
We’ve just started using Convio’s TeamRaiser. I can’t believe how bad the customer service is.
I feel this pain. I used to work as a Data Architect and was recently hired to manage Blackbaud Sphere (Kintera) for a non-profit. Bottom line: I will not renew the contract unless they improve the product.
Some specific pain points:
1) Inconsistent data model for gifts: Gifts are treated differently if they are entered through an "event" (online donation page) vs manually through the GUI. Why? This has broad-reaching consequences, but to shorten up this posting, it makes it very hard to manage gifts. And this system is ABOUT gifts.
2) Designed for the inept: More than one Blackbaud support rep has told me (paraphrasing) "The GUI ~used~ to let you do that, but we took that feature away because people kept messing up their data." e.g., deleting a donation or pledge, or changing the campaign on a gift entered online, or associating a gift to a pledge if the pledge was created after the gift. The interface is designed for people who can't be trusted to manage their own data in the first place, and there is no facility to allow competent people to work freely.
3) CMS Lockdown: No support for server-side pages. Limited native support for customizing forms.
4) Bugs treated as product enhancements: I recently found two cases where split gifts do not roll up consistently between the ad hoc query tool and the default gift view. The response was, "we'll consider it for a future release." This is a bug, not a feature enhancement.
5) Slow: Updating records through the GUI is slow, and the replication of those records to the reporting database is slow. As someone who has worked on VLDB systems, I sense that the databases are not properly partitioned between clients. It is especially suspicious that all clients must share the same username identifiers – for SAAS, this is not good segregation. It's like having your hosting service tell you, "sorry, your web page will have to be renamed because another client already created a page with the same name." Really.
I would rather extract all the data from this system and start over with a new vendor than try to make this system work given the current constraints. That said, my org can't afford to, so I'm stuck.
That said, I have found the support group to be helpful and accessible. I feel like our account manager wants to do right by us and is trying to advocate for us. I have a long list of issues (too long to go into here) submitted to Blackbaud support, and if I make headway I will post back here to give an update.