Overview
What is Blackbaud CRM?
Designed for large, complex organizations as well as federated and international nonprofits.
Review from fundraising professional
The Higher Education Standard
BB e-CRM - Investigated, selected, installed and rewarded!
Good product!
Adequate but not Exceptional
Great tool needs more support to carry into the future
Blackbaud CRM provides value for better fundraising, relationship management, and prospect engagement
Blackbaud CRM is a game changer for higher education advancement offices
Blackbaud - Enhance your donation and fundraising processes
Blackbaud CRM to the rescue for all your CRM queries!
Face for Radio. Things aren't always what they seem.
Rock solid software system
Blackbaud CRM has solved all of our needs!
Blackbaud for your non-profit
Awards
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Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
What is Blackbaud CRM?
Designed for large, complex organizations as well as federated and international nonprofits.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Blackbaud CRM?
Blackbaud CRM for enterprise-scale Nonprofits, Higher Education, and Healthcare organizations combines data management and automation with the ability to scale, adapt, and integrate across applications to retain and grow supporter value. Its out-of-the-box capabilities enable enterprise-level advancement organizations to work more effectively with large, multidimensional datasets, including:
- A holistic view of constituents to manage interactions with them based on whether they are Individuals, Households, Groups, or Corporations and maintain visibility into corporate hierarchy.
- Sophisticated donor management capabilities such as Stewardship Plans, Fund Management, Recognition Programs, Naming Opportunities, and Donor Challenges to increase donor engagement.
- Market segmentation to support complex multi-channel outreach programs.
- Research and Analytics powered by Blackbaud’s native prospect research tool, ResearchPoint, including data modeling and benchmarking.
- Mobile and web access to empower on the go fundraisers with constituent information through their mobile devices.
- Direct
data access to cloud environments via read-only, read-write, and self-service
developer portal to speed development cycle while maintaining control and
optimizing security and compliance.
Blackbaud CRM Features
- Supported: A single source of truth with a holistic view of constituents whether they are Individuals, Households, Groups, or Corporations
- Supported: Moves management and stewardship capabilities to expand and nurture major donors
- Supported: Segmentation support for multi-channel campaigns
- Supported: Planned Giving, Matching Gift Management, and Online Giving to support specialized fundraising needs
- Supported: Automated receipting and acknowledgement, end-to-end credit card processing and robust accounting functionality streamline gift and revenue management
- Supported: Ability to tap into Blackbaud's philanthropic data set and data modeling
- Supported: Integration with business intelligence and data analytics solutions.
- Supported: Microsoft integrations to automate key visualizations, workflows and build low-code/no-code apps
- Supported: Open, industry-standard REST APIs to extend and customize the core CRM solution.
- Supported: Wide selection of partner apps in Blackbaud Marketplace.
- Supported: Extensible revenue data model to manage process of tracking, crediting and recognizing donors based on the gifts they make
- Supported: Embedded data hygiene management including duplication management and address validation
Blackbaud CRM Competitors
Blackbaud CRM Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | Mobile Web |
Supported Countries | Global - US, Canada, EMEA, Asia-Pacific |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(112)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-23 of 23)Blackbaud
- Allows me to link my email interactions directly into the system
- Has areas to store all information about a person
- Easy to pull just the information I need
Review from fundraising professional
- Easy to edit data points (address, etc.)
- When viewing a constituent you can see a lot of data points at once
- Giving history is fairly easy to navigate and understand
- When querying data, it will double count gifts (self credit and spouse credit)
- Unable to delete prior contact info, can only end date it
- Unable to list preferred pronouns
The Higher Education Standard
- Display of Information
- Customization
- Covering all aspects of fundraising
- Though Customizable, can be difficult to do
- Expansion of Salesforce like interaction management
BB e-CRM - Investigated, selected, installed and rewarded!
- Accessing in-depth data for a single constituent is easily done and customizable by user working with "tiles" on the home screen
- Generating lists of possible prospects with specific similarities can be done with a few clicks and then stored for more research later
- well designed relationship options allow for a a look at specific constituents and how they might relate to other constituents in the system leading to more effective prospecting
- Screens can be easily customized by user or user group eliminating irrelevant data and presenting only truly relevant information
- Tighter integration with other BB products like Award Management would be nice
- Better emailing and event modules within BBIS would allow us to do more within CRM and not have to support extra software
- More and better API will allow users to build more sophisticated interface to external products
Good product!
- Volume of information it can hold
- Flexibility around customizing how we store data
- Making customizations easier
- There are some free text fields that are so small it makes reading things like a contact report very difficult.
Adequate but not Exceptional
- Blackbaud constituent profiles are easy to navigate to find basic information (address, phone, email, prospect manager, documentation).
- The constituent summary at the top of the constituent page is useful for quickly seeing pertinent information.
- Links embedded within the constituent summary make it easy to quickly navigate a constituent's profile.
- Certain aspects of Blackbaud are oddly non-customizable.
- Blackbaud updates/support is slow and often ineffective - our organization switched to Microsoft 365, which is apparently incompatible with Blackbaud. Help/support recommended clunky workarounds that don't actually work, rather than proactively enhancing compatibility
- There should be a flag in constituent search to show which people in the results list are deceased.
- Query isn't very user friendly. It should be simple to locate the information that you want to pull, and add parameters to that information. Instead you have to write multiple queries to set parameters, then write a query that looks at those other queries. It's time-consuming and easy to make mistakes, and the knowledge/proficiency is difficult to explain or transfer to new staff.
- Blackbaud generally just feels like its technology is outdated. It wasn't built for the needs of a modern organization, and its developers have failed to make the necessary improvements over time to stay competitive.
- Analytics
- Wealth screening
- Sophisticated functionality
- Customer service
- New development
Blackbaud CRM provides value for better fundraising, relationship management, and prospect engagement
- Makes it easy for fundraisers to keep track of the activity they need or want to accomplish
- Allows fundraisers to easily enter email correspondence through their email add-on
- Listens to customer feedback and makes quality enhancements
- The sticky function of data filtering.
- It can be overwhelming because there is so much information.
- The way revenue/gifts are can be confusing. There are also too many tabs to find information.
- There are a lot of little frustrations and tedious little steps to complete.
- Efficiently tracks charitable donations
- Strong analytics and reports
- Creates tax receipts for donors
- Can be difficult to use if you don't have experience - more user friendly
- The reports and analytics are not easily customisable.
- User/Customer support can be improved.
Blackbaud CRM has solved all of our needs!
- It is incredibly user-friendly! From the first time I opened a constituent profile, I could easily navigate between tabs and find the information I need in a timely fashion without confusion.
- It allows personalization! Depending on what information is most relevant to me, I can organize the widgets that are shown first. I typically look at the same few pieces of information on every profile, so I don't have to dig for it!
- I love the "Recently Accessed" feature to the left of the main page. It helps me navigate to the last few records I've looked at. However, if I'm doing a fuzzy search for "John Smith" and I click on the wrong one, it'd be great if that search was added to my "recently accessed" list, instead of just the record I clicked on. This would allow me to keep up with which names in the search I've already looked at.
- Query View! I have recently started using queries and they are so helpful. However, they are very difficult to learn and hard to tailor to exactly what I need. The main issue, as a higher education institution, is that a lot of our constituents have multiple pieces of information for categories. For example, if I want to pull a list of alumni who graduated with a degree in Marketing, some alumni may be missing if their primary degree is not Marketing - and some alumni may be repeated.
Blackbaud for your non-profit
- Accurate collection of contact information.
- Multi-user access.
- Payment options.
- Forms.
Blackbaud leaves much to be desired
- Growing donor/supporter base.
- Collecting donations.
- Having a landing page for donations.
- The internal CMS is extremely difficult to use.
- It's hard to get someone on the phone.
- Customizable
- Personalization in emails
- Support articles
- Hard to use interface
- Outdated front end
- Importing contacts takes multiple steps, is not easy or intuitive
- Hard to teach others how to use Blackbaud
- Difficult to find what I need
- Very hard to segment out inactive emails
Not just another database solution...
- Support is second-to-none.
- Blackbaud CRM is one of the more customizable options. Since you can't always be sure of future needs, this is a must-have.
- It is one of the easier systems to learn. Many CRM options are cumbersome and require much more training. I had no issue training individuals with varied experience levels.
- As with most (read: all) Blackbaud products, the pricing is a bit high. There are other options that are significantly cheaper - which makes Blackbaud CRM a much less-likely option for smaller organizations.
Blackbaud review
- Pledge reports are clear and easy to run, as well as a few other financial reports.
- Records are clearly organized with tabs to select your area of interest
- Record searching is all inclusive
- The platform for event management and registration did not work as promised. Data being imported was all wrong and had to be removed
- Poor customer service
- Social fundraising aspect did not work as promised
CRM after using and implementing for multiple organizations
- The user interface is user friendly, intuitive and customizable through security. Reduces the change management obstacle in training.
- The application is both configurable and customizable. This presents significant benefits in addressing unanticipated needs, once the proper resources, and training are established. Examples are creating custom reports, adding functionality, interfacing with other applications / platforms.
- Support and application enhancements. Blackbaud support is effective in addressing out of the box functionality and overall supporting customizations as well. Blackbaud's knowledge base and community provide several resources that can be leveraged in support and enhancing the application.
- As an enterprise application, I would like to see additional application administration functionality incorporated as part of the application. A specific example is providing additional functionality to address database maintenance.
- Additional report development tools to allow users (non technical) to create dynamic reports. Currently you can use MS Report Builder and leverage an adhoc query but believe this can be enhanced further.
- Surface the Financial Transaction Model to the application further. This would allow users to see revenue changes overtime better when reconciling revenue.
I'm a fan of Blackbaud!
- The product was very good at maintaining records and information. The information was agile and simple to retrieve and operationalize.
- The system is user friendly. We implemented across an entire campus and more specifically within a division with hundreds of employees. Overall people took to it quickly.
- The product I think does a more than adequate job of managing contact tracking which is key in all kinds of fields. This is critical because either for your own reasons, or as you depart from an organization, you are able to leave an accurate track record of your activities for the organization's continued success.
- Three words. Desk. Top. Queries. I advocated for this the whole time I was there. Was told that users querying information from their desktops would crash the system. Can't believe it. Product like this shouldn't have that problem and as a user, my job would have been made infinitely easier had I been able to query information on the desktop.
Blackbaud/Convio daily user
- It integrates your database, allowing you to collect registrations and donations online, and then build email communications and websites that integrate with those contacts, so you don't have to import/export between tools.
- It also provides tools for your participants, so they can customize their experience with your website and your communications, manage their own fundraising and participation, and conduct their own peer-to-peer fundraising efforts.
- Blackbaud's responsiveness to their clients reporting issues with their CRM is notoriously delayed. It often takes them years to address bugs, and if the issues reported are just "nice to haves" and non-urgent, they often never get addressed.
- The system has required significant customization on our end to make it work for us. While we've had clients who are smaller organizations use it right out of the box, if you are a larger organization with more specific needs, you're going to need a consultant or a IT department to help you customize the system.
- The help feature built into the system is not very helpful and often outdated, with information that doesn't reflect the way the system currently operates. (They are also doing updates but not updating the help.) The online trainings that Blackbaud offers are pretty superficial and often don't speak to the way an organization uses the system. I've trained myself to use the system, through trial, error and explore, and our organizations trains all of our employees and clients on Blackbaud ourselves. Blackbaud does not provide that.
Easy to Use!
- Track constituent information
- Record financial information
- Store constituent information such as interactions, donations and activities.
- Synching with the CMS
BBNC ...is it for your org?
- Donor information-donation tracking, contactable information
- Website platform
- Membership selling and tracking
- Managing campaigns
- Event registration
- BBMS (merchant account)
- Locked configuration strategy- if you have a high turn over, or an undocumented culture you will want to find a solution that supports change management. The config files are locked in Blackbaud which means some things you can't change. For orgs that have frequent turn-over this strategy is helpful.
- Blackbaud has tutorials online as well as classes in person staff can take. They offer certificates so supervisors know that staff have been exposed to a body of knowledge. When staff members take the workshops it is important to provide them the time to practice and use what they just learned. We purchased (for a high fee) a pass for any of our staff to take as many of the workshops as possible. We also offered this to key volunteers- as more knowledge makes folks more employable and more comfortable.
- Blackbaud has a very strong team of sales staff. Make sure you demo and that you know what you want. Fees are sadly complicated so use a spreadsheet. Once a quote is sent in writing my experience is there was very little flexibility in pricing. So your first call is really important. Do your homework.
- The Sales experience is rough. Be prepared. Write everything down. It is rough because if you are new you do not know what to ask for. You have the purchase of the function and the maintenance of the functionality you purchase. It is complicated and tricky. It is also frustrating.
- Costs are not consistent. Caution...you are on your own to set your limit or what you can pay, If you are not a techy and new or uncomfortable with negotiations you probably should involve others. Make them explain each line item to you. Do not sign until you know you have everything you will need to achieve your goals.
- There documentation is old school and lacks graphics, workflow and is loaded with text. I would like to use user videos with click through demos.
A Fundraiser's View of the CRM suite
- Plenty of space to add detailed notes
- Easy for different members of the staff to see the same information
- Can be used well by trained staff to pull reports for management
- Not always easy to use when trying to find a new function that one was not previously familiar with
- No ability to use via iPhone or other mobile device
- Not easy for remote users who are not inside the secure company network to print reports - too many steps to go through the VPN, etc.
My Review and what it do...
- Constituent Management - It's a great database to store donor information
- Email Deployment - Since joining with Convio there are a lot more functionalities
- Landing Page Provisioning - It's a great place to keep all assets in one place
- The main area for improvement is with access for agencies. Seeing that Salvation Army utilized many agencies it was hard to make sure that assets stayed unique to one place.
More than just a donor database
- Customization of fields is really awesome - you can do basically anything you can think of
- Report pulling is super useful and you can analyze any information that is in the database
- Mobile/remote access is particularly useful in our organization
- Reports can be tricky to get correct
- Mass imports are hard to get correct - you often have to refer back to the fields, which means you have to start over completely
- Sometimes, the system just runs super slow