Speaker 1: Hi, my name's Doug. I serve as president of a non-profit, and I can only give Salsa CRM 2 out of 5. We tried several fundraiser programs. For example, we tried a program called Bloomerang. And it was somewhat intuitive, but probably it gave up a little bit of power in favor of being easy. We tried Salesforce, and it seemed to push us more in a corporate model. It didn't really seem to fit as well in our non-profit world, and boy, it was cumbersome for us. It just felt very over-restrictive. We also tried a kind of a well-known open-source product called CBCRM. Boy, you pretty much need an IT guy to do that. We have one, and he did get it stood up for us. But boy, it was just like crazy to make any kind of changes at all, and it really didn't mesh well with anything else we were doing. And overall, it just felt really kludgy. We tried DonorPerfect, and that just felt so 1990s-ish. And it really didn't seem to be kind of in the modern world of software. So really we were left wondering, surely there's something more out there. When we found SalsaCRM, it was through a referral of one of our workers, and she was just all convinced it was the best for social media. And she kind of made it a big deal, like, hey, there is nothing else that can compare to this. So unfortunately, I've got to admit, I didn't go out and do a market analysis. I just said, okay, we're going to go with this because this lady knows a lot about social media. Let's go with the flow. It did have a component that did seem to relate well with social media, and that part of it is called Salsa Engage. It's kind of like somebody joined the company that knew about social media and knew about programming, and they invented that part of the program, and it worked pretty well. So we were kind of excited about the offer that it made for social media when we saw that component. Boy, the onboarding, I've got to say, was a little more complicated than I would have wished. The CRM side, the customer relation management side, constituent relation management side, that felt very precise. And I guess with great precision and sophistication comes great complexity, and with great complexity comes sometimes great frustration, and that's what we felt. Importing our data, even though we probably only had 6,000 or 7,000 records at a time, importing our data into Salsa, it felt so restrictive. We had to get everything exactly right with every import, and boy, we just did so many to try to get it correct. And as we were importing it, we began to realize, yes, this thing sounds powerful and it seems powerful, but there's something different about the CRM side of things. And finally, we realized we were dealing with two completely separate programs. One was Salsa CRM. The other was Salsa Engage, and they were two completely different platforms. And some programmer had tried to build a bridge across the two, and maybe had decidedly thought that he did okay at that and then quit the company, because honestly, they weren't bridged very well, in our opinion. And so from the beginning, the importing and the onboarding was hard. We did try to call the company and couldn't ever get them by phone much. They answered email, usually within a half day, but the answers weren't swift, and they weren't very actually helpful sometimes. It was as if the person talking to us wasn't really the programmer, and she would have to go for answers. So we always felt put off and waiting, and honestly, I'll just be honest, the onboarding didn't seem to go very smoothly. Honestly, if you asked me the question, what recommendations would we have for people considering Salsa CRM, I think my answer would be fairly short. Run. Honestly, it looks like, to me, let's just be honest, the company that is Salsa CRM really didn't program this software from the ground up. They bought this, and you can see that if you look under their hood sometimes. There'll be this fleeting moment that you'll see the original title. This was a program called DonorPro, and they must have bought it from some company that was going out of business in the 90s, and frankly, we should have let them go out of business, with all due respect. They took this thing called DonorPro, but it doesn't look like they really understood it very well, and they said, ooh, this looks old-fashioned. We better make something that looks newer, and they programmed this new thing called Salsa Engage. Now, I gotta say, if they had hired the people who did the Salsa Engage part to write the whole program and make it one unified solution from the ground up, maybe it would have been okay, because on the Salsa Engage side, you can tell it's got some modern finesse to it, but it's so convoluted to get to things, and even on the Salsa Engage side, for us anyway, it's like you kind of have to know some reverse logic to understand where to get to things. But then what they did is they built this sort of connector utility to transfer things back and forth between Salsa Engage and Salsa CRM. The funny thing is, Salsa Engage doesn't really have a CRM component to it at all. It depends totally on Salsa CRM. And the other funny thing is, Salsa CRM doesn't have any kind of communications component to it to speak of at all. You can't email someone from within Salsa CRM. You have to use Salsa Engage. And even at the end of the day, it was hard for me to figure out how you would do large emails, because they don't really have any kind of component built in that is married to something like MailChimp or that functions like MailChimp. So at the end of the day, you're looking at this and you're thinking, I got tricked into this. In the first place, I got tricked into using a dual-sided, dual-headed gorilla, and boy, to do anything in Salsa CRM, you had to think like a 1990s user. And for instance, the reporting component is a beast. I studied it and studied it. I went online. There were almost no materials to help me understand the reporting component. But I did some programming in the past, probably 20 years ago, just some very basic relational database management stuff that helped me think in these terms. And after I worked at it really hard, I finally figured out how to design my first report, after which I wrote the company and said, this was hard. And the lady wrote back and said, oh, yeah, we don't encourage our customers to write reports for this. I said, what do you encourage them to do? Oh, you know, we can develop reports for you. I thought, that's crazy. And we reported the glitches to them. For example, when it logged you out of the Salsa CRM side, and then you try to log back in from the same screen, you got this horrible two-word answer, forbidden screen up there. And I finally wrote the lady that was our customer support lady, and I said, look, we pay thousands of dollars for this program. I don't want to see something that says forbidden screen just because it logged me off because I was idle for two hours. I want to say, welcome, Doug, or whatever. No way. And we kept reporting this to them over and over again. That's like one little tiny sliver. And she would keep coming back and say, oh, wait until October. It'll come. It'll come. It never came. And even all the way through canceling the program, it never came. They weren't responsive to fixing things. I think the reason why is because they didn't program it. They bought it from DonorPro. I don't have any reason to say this other than to save you the frustration I experienced. If somebody recommends, one of your staff people recommends that you use this, run. Don't even walk away. Run away. Tell them they're welcome to pay for it on their own dime, but I encourage you, do not use company money for this program. And I'm not getting paid to say this by anybody else. Run. Don't walk.