Little Green Light Reviews

Great Solution for Small Non Profits

Comments: It's made keep track of and mailing donation receipts a million times easier and has proven to be a good alternative.

Pros:

Very Nice Interface and a simple system for entering and searching donor records. Designed with non profits in mind.

Cons:

Multi-item donations are annoying to input due to a single line field for donated goods.

Little Green Light gets the Green Light

Comments: Been great and we plan on staying with LGL For the foreseable future.

Pros:

LGL gives or org an easy solution for CRM, Events, Giving and volunteer tracking. It was easy to pick up and train people on and fits our needs.

Cons:

Some of the email features take a bit of tweaking found it easier to use MailChim or others.

Clunky, skinny, but cheap

Comments: Customer service is friendly but I don't like that I can't reach them immediately.

Pros:

This is great if you are a smaller organization--maybe no more than 2,000-3,000 donors. It features basic gift entry, pledges, contact info, etc. If you are a nonprofit just getting started, this could work for you.

Cons:

Not intuitive. Hard to learn. Tutorials are complicated. I've been working with it for 4 years now and still not sure how to run reports. Not robust nor intuitive. Our organization has moved past the effectiveness threshold of this product, and we are looking at others.

A thoughtful review of LGL :)

Pros:

Little Green Light is very user friendly. There are alot of training materials that are useful for learning how to use it as well as a very responsive and knowledgeable Help Team.

Cons:

Not being able to do a bulk import of gifts that is sent to the QKB que automatically. When we do a major donation push, I have to spend alot of time doing manual entries so that our bookkeeper sees them in the que. That feature would be super helpful.

See the Light!

Comments: Makes managing our grants very easy. We love using it.

Pros:

It is so simple to use. It is cost effective. The ease of pulling data out are a huge benefit to our organization

Cons:

There are minor customization that would be helpful.

Little Green Light Keeps my Fundraising on Track!

Comments: I love Little Green Light! It keeps me organized and helps build relationship with my donors!

Pros:

Little Green Light is easy to use and assists me in keeping track of my fundraising, donations, and constituents. I like that I can create mailing lists, emails, and generate thank you letters after my organization receives a donation.

Cons:

Little Green Light is a little dated and is not as aesthetically pleasing as other CRMS.

Little Green Light Helps Little Non-Profits

Comments: Easy to use, stable with no issues of down servers.

Pros:

Easy to set up, easy to use, and allows multiple levels of user access.

Cons:

It doesn't provide a simple accounting side as part of the product. You must purchase and integrate a separate accounting system.

The best program for donor tracking we've found

Comments: I love the simplicity of it. The ease of use makes it easy to train on and it keeps all of our donors organized very well!

Pros:

the usability. Its very easy to use and edit and very organized. The pages aren't over-full of information making finding the donor I'm looking for a very simple process.

Cons:

It doesn't have a lot of functions that other even programs have so we don't use it for events, auctions etc.

Great CRM at a great price

Comments: Little Green Light provides our small organization with a user friendly, thoughtful, and responsive constituent relationship management solution, and at one of the most reasonable prices in its field. We use it primarily to manage donations and relationships. Bottom line is the product is excellent and I recommend it to others.

Pros:

LGL is easy to use from data entry to automated acknowledgements to the filters and reports and big picture review. The learning curve is very quick, which was important as I am the only one managing it, among the many other roles I have. One other person occasionally accesses the data, and it's been easy for them as well. One of the best features is the support that they provide. They respond very promptly and thoughtfully via email to any questions and issues. While I was initially concerned that I couldn't call with questions, this has never been an issue, and in fact the emails make it easy for me to send a link or screen shot of any issue I may be having when I can't figure out the solution from the plentiful online resources they provide. I've received many replies from them well after regular business hours. They also continually update their product in response to user needs and suggestions. There is plenty of room to customize fields and add custom tags, etc. There's also a great facebook group of users who support each other with suggestions about best practices within LGL and beyond.

Cons:

The integrated donation forms could use a more modern look, but it still works well. While it might be nice if the whole admin interface was more modern, the interface is clean and the usability and features are the most important to me. Complex mapping for an import can occasionally be a challenge (likely with any product), but LGL has always responded quickly with solutions.

Great Donor Management Tool for Non-profits

Comments: It was been a great system. We are using it to track donations as well as membership in our organization. It is also a wonderful sign up tool for specific events. The forms created in LGL look so professional and are so easy manage. The online knowledge base is vast and can usually answer any question or guide throug a process. Have only had to contact live support a couple of times and they have been responsive.

Pros:

We needed a donor management system that delivered more than just a spreadsheet. After much research, we decided LGL met all our requirements--and more and at a reasonable price.

Cons:

Nothing that comes to mind. We are very happy with LGL.

A great CRM platform for nonprofits

Comments: We used to have our constituents' contact info, contact report info, and giving data scattered across a motley collection of manually- and inconsistently-updated platforms, and none of it was integrated with Constant Contact or our email. It was extremely difficult to search for constituents or financial gifts or tag them in any useful way. All truly meaningful information was stored in our team members' heads, where it could be lost track of, and this was having a negative impact on our fundraising. LGL has enabled us to pull our many disparate forms of data into a single platform, unify them within each constituent's record, start sending out automated acknowledgements for donations, stay in close communication with each other about each constituent, and overall just improve our ability to provide a high-quality experience for our constituents when we reach out to them.

Pros:

Its customizability; its absolutely top-notch and responsive customer support; its rich metadata and extensive set of features; its powerful import engine; its flexible report functionality; its integration with automated acknowledgement emails, Constant Contact, and webforms / online payment processing; its great support for task management and communication between team members; and the fact that we can download a comprehensive export of all its data at any time, which makes keeping backups easy.

Cons:

Navigating through all of its complexity can sometimes be confusing and intimidating at first, until you learn its workflows; search is fragmented—you can't just search and get all records that might match: you have to search in one place to find constituents and search in a second place to find financial data and search in a third place to find activity data; the inability to hide UI elements for features we're not making use of; not quite as much roles & permissions flexibility as we'd like.

Our Perfect Solution

Comments: Coming from Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge ridiculously expensive and overly complicated system, every single thing about LGL is a breath of fresh air and a joy to use. From working with our consultant on data migration to every day use, it's intuitive and simple to use. I'm still learning new and impressive functionality and am pleasantly surprised every time. Updates that are rolled out actually fix issues or improve functionality ( they listen to their users!). Customer service is email only, but usually quick and very helpful. The Facebook community is a nice addition as well - sometimes I can get answers there without needing to contact support. I only wish we had made the switch sooner - would have saved our organization tens of thousands of dollars and myself so much frustration.

Pros:

1. The price absolutely cannot be beat, especially compared to Blackbaud. 2. It's just so simple to use. Intuitive, quick, and easy, yet still packed full of useful features.

Cons:

Initially, what I liked least was that there was no live phone or chat support; email only. But, the longer I use LGL and see how little I need support, the more I don't mind it at all. Plus email support usually replies quickly and has the solution I need.

Low Cost Effective Donor Management Solution

Comments: I'm able to clean up a database that had become a hideous mess in GiftWorks Cloud. I'm able to identify and easily clear duplicate donors and duplicate gifts. (I've removed about 300 duplicate constituents so far … roughly 8% of my total database … about 100 more to go)

Pros:

It's super easy to learn and use. Everything you need is built in -- the dashboard that keeps you focused on what you have (or haven't) recently raised against your goals, the basic reports (which can be customized). Donor record entry includes US mailing address verification -- yay! LGL is also clear about what it does and doesn't do. So it doesn't claim to link directly with a peer-to-peer product -- and it's also not messing up my database by uploading a duplicate entry for every single person who registers in the peer-to-peer product (which has a different default name protocol).

Cons:

So far, I don't have any complaints. I'm already using features I didn't expect to (emailing directly through the system, which allows the Contact to be automatically logged in the Constituent record). I suppose LGL could be prettier. But given the choice between pretty and functional, I'll take a product that works any day.

Great product for price

Comments: Great. I want to get really good at using it.

Pros:

Tracking data is fun and interesting. hh

Cons:

I think reports can be easier to pull and forms easier to use

We've tried other CRM's.... non compare to LGL.

Pros:

We are relatively new at using the software, but, so far, it's been amazing. The trainings and support staff are amazing. Thank you so much!

Cons:

We haven't had any issues with Little Green Light at this time.

New setup of LGL

Comments: So far so good apart from finding missing data when we setup LGL integration.

Pros:

LGL has an easy to use interface across all areas.

Cons:

Downloading old CRM program data was incomplete and needed much recovery fiddling.

LGL for a volunteer organization

Comments: Our experience with LGL has been very positive. It was easy to install, customize, and learn. The online help library and support team are great.

Pros:

Product was quick and easy to implement. It also allowed us to upload our donor files from a spreadsheet.

Cons:

That uploaded receipts are not attached to the relevant gift so they can easily be found.

Veterans Organization appreciates LGL

Pros:

I'd say the most liked is the final building of the organization's health. Once all the data is in, everything flows to the appropriate budget area and the "light" comes on.

Cons:

I would like to see a standard report of the organization's health. Example: Everything on the right of the dashboard is the report. No need to build it in the "reports" area. Just a standard report of the dashboard information on the right.

Little Green Light brought our growing, volunteer-run nonprofit into the 21st century.

Comments: Being cloud-based, Little Green Light allows several board members to access, add, and alter donor information. This turns our database into a collaborative crowd-sourced information bank we can all use wherever we may be even on our mobile phones. The sort and search features in the reporting system are as powerful as any I've seen in far more expensive software. We moved to Little Green Light from a Filemaker Pro database maintained by a single board member. She is still our key administrator, but now she feels appreciated and supported instead of isolated. The improvement in morale alone is worth the price of admission!

Pros:

Powerful and versatile, Little Green Light has all the features I was accustomed to from software at other nonprofits I've worked at including eTapestry and Bloomerang but at a fraction of the cost. The interface is highly intuitive, and LGL has shown a real commitment to continual improvement over time. I truly enjoyed the data migration process from our old system to LGL in part because we worked one-on-one with a Little Green Light consultant (Carrie Grote) who treated us as if we were her only client. If you're a startup nonprofit wondering whether or not to take the leap into state-of-the-art donor management, I strongly recommend Little Green Light. It may easily be the only software you'll ever need to track and nourish donor relationships.

Cons:

There are some minor tweaks that might improve Little Green Light. For example, when a donor wishes for a gift to be anonymous, there's a checkbox you need to hunt for. But honestly, the folks at LGL are way ahead of me when it comes to finding and fixing flaws. I bet the next LGL upgrade will be light years better than anything I can even imagine.

A little nuanced but great features, great price, and great service

Pros:

It has just about everything that you would need! I love the extensiveness and customizability of the platform.

Cons:

Sometimes, things are a little complicated. We would love to have more of our team proficient in LGL but it sometimes seems that the training that is needed is too extensive for what we need to do in LGL. For now we just let the team members with a good grasp of the platform use it.

Little Green Light has been great

Comments: I and the board appreciate the various reports that can be easily generated. Because of the pandemic, we haven't been using it as much as we expected, but I still appreciate LGL: it's ease of use, clear Knowledge Base articles with easy to understand examples, and the additional support of being able to email someone. The flexibility is also great, so we truly feel we can make it as we want it rather than having to fit what we want to what the software can do.

Pros:

I evaluated multiple products and highly recommended Little Green Light to my organization. It had the functionality we needed and, even though I was new to donor management software, I found it intuitive to use. Almost everything I've been able to figure out how to do on my own. A few times, I've had to use the Knowledge Base, which I've found to be very helpful. The very few times I couldn't find my answer there, I sent email and the response has always been phenomenal. I've received responses very quickly, even outside of their posted hours for responding. The help has been clear, concise, and friendly, including sometimes setting up a search for me on my account. Once, the response led me to wonder about a better way to accomplish my task but I had further questions. Again, the response was very quick and useful. I've attended multiple webinars and they, like the personalized help, were very informative, clear, and informative. I'm looking forward to what I'll learn in my upcoming webinars. The Flex Importer is very useful to us because we already receive much of our donation information as spreadsheets. We also appreciate having donations as well as volunteer information all in one place. I certainly haven't stressed LGL, but it is providing us the functionality we need with an easy-to-use interface and multiple systems of support so I'm never waiting days to learn how to do what I want.

Cons:

I initially had trouble with creating a mailing because I misunderstood that a screen was a sample screen and should not be changing even though I made changes. When I used the mailer to send a test message to board members, the feedback I received was that the email address made the message appear to be spam so they didn't read it. That was over a year ago, so the system may have changed. We're a small organization and haven't needed to send emails during the pandemic.

A wonderful reasonably priced fundraising software product

Comments: We track our donors in it, including all contacts and correspondence.

Pros:

We're a modest organization and some of the fundraising software is incredibly expensive, up to 5-10 times LGL's modest $400 yearly cost. LGL is extremely reasonable, but also very powerful. It lets us record all the key data about our donors and prospects. It lets multiple staffers enter and access the data, all for one reasonable price. I love how you can do a BCC to their dropbox address on a letter to a donor and it gets automatically added to the person's record. There's a slight learning curve to segmenting donor lists and spitting them out in reports, but it can really do pretty much anything you need. So we're very happy with it and will continue to use it.

Cons:

I would like to be able to delete some of the standard fields that are designed for schools, which is where the product got its start. And it would be nice to be able to call for help, but their staff is very quick and responsive when you email them. Maybe they could offer a premium option for some phone help. But honestly, it's just a really good product, especially if you look at their extensive online help section of how to explanations and videos.

A brilliant CRM for nonprofits

Comments: LGL is a fantastic CRM for nonprofit use. We use it daily and it hasn't let us down yet. There's a great selection of integrations, such as Mailchimp, and a Zapier plugin so that other software can be integrated with ease. LGL does exactly what it promises - it provides straightforward yet powerful storage of all data pertaining to our donors and fundraising.

Pros:

LGL is great value for money, especially when working within a nonprofit budget. The platform is fully featured and easily customisable. I especially like the recently released Zapier integration, as this allows us to automate the importing of donations from our fundraising software. The support team are also very responsive and helpful.

Cons:

While LGL Forms is a well thought-out and fully featured piece of the CRM, the ability to style the forms leaves a lot to be desired. Because of this, we have reverted to using another platform for donations, and importing them into LGL using automation.

Little Green Light has transformed my ability to steward my donors and track donations.

Comments: It's given me hours of my life back due to all the work it does automatically. It makes me look like a superstar in my job. It gives me the ability to look back on years of data and see trends and improvements. It gives me peace of mind knowing that my data is stored safely on the cloud. It gives me something to say when sales people for Salesforce come calling...and it has healed the psychic damage that was done to me by trying to make Salesforce work for us. It satisfies my love of data and databases and perfection.

Pros:

I love the way it integrates online donations into my donor records -- so easy and so professional. I especially appreciate their customer support -- if I have a question, I just send an email and I get a quick reply within hours. The software is very user friendly and adaptable to my way of doing business. Clearly it was created with a great understanding of nonprofits!

Cons:

While I love having the ability to track and create acknowledgements, there are some features in this area that don't fit my process. I write cards by hand, and sometimes I only get a couple done at a time. I wish I could mark them done individually rather than by batch. I also would like to have the choice of Volunteer Hours under Related Gifts--several companies, like Microsoft, donate to us for volunteer hours put in by their full time employees. And I wish that when a recurring donation fails that the donor would automatically get an emailed notification from LGL Forms.

Looking for a Reasonably Priced Comprehensive Donor Management Software?

Comments: I have been in development for 30 years and used many donor management products from Raisers Edge to Harness. Our agency has been using LGL for 8 years. During that time, we actually tried other platforms. But kept it and came back to LGL for its ease of use and comprehensive tools that meet all of our needs. LGL was created from a donor management view. Many of the new platforms have been created from a social media view so they miss a lot of the critical elements that are needed to manage donors and help an agency be successful.

Pros:

LGL is user friendly. Almost anyone with some database experience can work with this software in a very short time. It is forgiving. It is comprehensive. It does not have ALL the bells and whistles. But rarely does an organization actually use all of those. But it has what you really need to do a great job.

Cons:

I would like to be able to have multiple contacts for a business or organization without adding another constituent for the same business.