We are in the process of making a final decision whether to go with NetCommunity or Sphere.  I have had some lengthy discussions with my colleagues and we are split between the 2 systems.  I am wondering if anyone uses either system and would be willing to share your thoughts and experiences from the design standpoint and data integration with Raiser's Edge.  Thank you.

We actually are using both products. We have RE and FE and we added Net Community a couple of years ago. It suits our needs for that one to one online community. Our constituents register and update their info, get targeted content and e-subscriptions. We email through BBNC. Before BBNC, we had a website developed and maintained by a vendor. We used this site for our online community and to collect donations and registrations. We used Convio for our walks. We were dissatisfied with Convio and were unhappy with our website in general because we couldn't make our own changes. We moved everything to BBNC. We were and are very happy with BBNC as our online community. Our walkers, however, wanted a more simplified solution that was based on their relationship with their supporters - not our relationship with those supporters/donors. When Blackbaud acquired Kintera, we implemented Sphere Friends Asking Friends for just our walks. As I mentioned, this relationship is different. It's all about our constituents managing their supporters. Sphere is working very well for us.This solution works very well for us. BBNC affords us the ability to build and change our website as we wish. We have that personal touch community where are users can share their info with us, find out about our organization, and receive content targeted to their interests. We have Sphere for our walks and our walkers have a comfortable and familiar "thon" atmosphere. The reporting is excellent and easy to use. We do little with our Sphere site other than set up the walks. The walkers do the rest.

 As for integration, we currently integrate BBNC with RE and RE with FE. BBNC integrates through a plug-in that allows one to review the information before accepting it. We hope to have the same kind of connector in place for Sphere very soon.

We don't really use Sphere for anything other than our walkathons so I can't speak to using it for an overall website. I'm happy to answer any questions I can to help.