What do you like best?
We are allowing staff to see specific data instead of asking Finance for the answer. I like the ability to run queries based on many different options. It is also nice once a query is made to share it with other staff members or copy it again for a new project. I enjoy all the different widgets on the dashboard. It helps give a quick glance on where we stand financially. The Gift import templates help save on re-entering the monthly ACH donations every month. When we did use Virtuous Giving, it was nice to have all the credit card donations imported each morning.
It is nice to have notes for each donor and staff can understand the changes the the giving by looking at notes. It also nice to help keep track of Thank you notes sent, phone calls, in person visits, etc.
What do you dislike?
We had to have a complete overhaul of our Quickbooks' Chart of Accounts and classes to help everything transfer over properly. Since we use classes in QBO, the data doesn't upload to QBO easily. Anytime a donation needs to be edited in Virtuous, we have to remember to change the deposit in QBO. To help find any errors, we run a monthly donation report by project to make sure the Virtuous project balance and the QBO class balance match. I dislike that sometimes it takes a while to figure out a query for what you what kind of data you would like to see. It does take awhile to learn all the steps for entering donations.
While we liked the credit card donations importing each month, we disliked having the access to update the donors credit card information when it expired or to change the amount. Most of our donors didn't want to the update the information in the donor portal themselves, they wanted us to do it for them. For this reason, we stopped using Virtuous Giving and manually enter all the credit card donations each day.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
Virtuous helped us to allow staff to see more information on the programs they are in charge of without giving them access to all accounts. It also helped with them being able to find their own answers instead of always asking Finance to find the answer. We like the benefit of sending emails to the whole database, and we have seen past donors give again. We enjoy the tags assigned to donors that help pull information faster and gives a quick snapshot of what the donor gives to.
