eTapestry
Vendor Site: www.etapestry.com
Example Client: www.autismeducation.net
The representative we spoke to emphasized that eTapestry is intended as an integrated online database, but they offer a high quality donation tool that is surprisingly affordable even when used alone. If the online donor database and email functionality meet the organization’s needs, this is an even better deal for those who want to integrate donation and email functionality in one package. The organization must have its own merchant account, and the lowest fees include support only via email.
Setup Fees: Medium Fees When Few Donations: Low Fees When Many Donations: Low
- $350 setup fee includes a basic form; additional costs may be required to add custom fields (costs are estimated and agreed upon before work begins)
- Monthly fee of $10/month if there are less than 500 donors in the eTapestry database. ($41 for 501- 1000 donors; $115 for 1001-5001 donors, etc)
- The client organization needs to setup their own merchant account, which will require additional fees. Different merchant accounts, but pricing ranges from about 3.3% per transaction to $50/month and 2.1% per transaction. eTapestry’s fees include the internet gateway fees
Merchant Account: Organization’s
- The organization must use their own merchant account
- The charge on the donor’s credit card will be shown in the organization’s name
Company Background: Excellent
- Private company that offers an online donor database with integrated donation and email capabilities
- They started taking online payments in the year 2000
- They report that the company is profitable, and the online payment functionality is self-supporting
- They have more than 600 clients currently using their donation tool; more than 3500 are using their online database
Setup and Support: Good
- eTapestry staff will setup the donation form based on the organization’s needs
- If the organization wants to make changes after the initial setup, eTapestry will estimate the effort needed and provide a cost for the changes
- Unlimited email support is included; unlimited phone support is available for $24/month
- Feedback about eTapestry’s customer service has been mixed: while some current customers report excellent service, others report that they are sometimes hard to reach and some of the representatives don’t have detailed knowledge of the product.
Donation Form Appearance: Excellent
- The donation form is completely tailored to the website, including the navigation, colors, and fonts
- The standard donation form is very clean, friendly, and well-designed, and includes no eTapestry branding
Donation Form Flexibility: Excellent
- Any custom fields can be added, potentially at additional charge
- The standard form is designed to include tributes, memorials, premiums, and matching gifts
- The receipt sent to the donor can account for gifts that are less than 100% taxable
Payment Processing: Good
- Commonly process Visa, Master Card, American Express, Discover, and Diners Club
- They support both recurring donations and eChecks when the organization uses a particular merchant account
- The do not support credit cards issued by banks outside
- Address and CSV code credit card checks are available
- They report that they have had 99.5% or better uptime, with the exception of scheduled downtime that occurs once a month for an hour or two in the middle of the night
Reports & Data: Excellent
- Donations go into a full eTapestry online database, which then provides many views and reports of the data
- Organizations can view month-to-month or year-to-year comparisons
- Data can be downloaded into a text file; both field order and column labels can be customized with a custom report writing feature
- eTapestry does not offer any method to access data programmatically that would allow a programmer to build an automated feed to another database
Money Distribution: Excellent
- Money is deposited directly into the organization’s account within a few days after donation
7 Comments:
One concern I have with eTap is that if you want to also use the credit card processing as part of an ecommerce store you need to go through them. It adds up very quickly. But I have found them very helpful in general.
Another aspect that can get costly is the importation of records, which is priced per import. It is not something that can be done regularly for free, so eTapestry isn't useful for managing a email list that may change a lot over the course of a year. Otherwise, I have been very satisfied.
Are you kidding me? I feel like I've used ever conceivable software, and this meets the needs of my changing organization no matter where we're at. I love that people can donate with V/MC/AMEX/DINERS/DISC cards and WE don't have to pay ANY extra fees besides the flat rate(not to mention not having to pay all those "hidden" fees that most processors have). Of their 2 CC processors, I chose IATS. I used to have paypal.
eTapestry is absolutely brutal. It is entirely counter-intuitive, and has no default or automatic features. Information is very difficult to access, and the reporting functionality is cumbersome. eTap is completely counter-intuitive and difficult to use. Unless you can dedicate a full-time employee to manage it, stay away.
The difficulty with eTap has been legend in our organization. The importation process was presented to us to do more than it really does. While online, there are at least 30 second waits between changing screens within a record as well as switching to another record. It makes data entry annoying.
eTapestry makes a simple task a difficult mess! Reporting is extremely complicated. It has taken me 2 days to run 4 simple reports because of an extremely complicated process. Even their tech support can't figure out why a simple task should be so difficult. Stay Away from eCrapestry!
Whilst the inital sales reps were unusually persuasive, the customer support I experienced was just awful. They seemed to suggest that they were doing me a favor by (eventually) returning my call, and were incredibly combatative and lacking in knowledge of their own product.
A horrible company to work with, I'm afraid.
Post a Comment