1. Home
  2. Nonprofit CRM Software
  3. Blackbaud CRM Reviews
  4. User Review of Blackbaud CRM
Adequate but not Exceptional
December 27, 2023

Adequate but not Exceptional

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud CRM

Our organization uses Blackbaud to capture constituent (alumni, faculty/staff, current students, friends) information, including biographical, education, involvements, interactions, and revenue; and query this information based on fundraiser needs.
  • 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  • Blackbaud generally just feels like its technology is outdated.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.
  • Our organization adopted Blackbaud mid-fundraising campaign and completed successfully completed our campaign, raising over $1 billion.
  • We were able to identify the wealth capacity of a targeted population of nearly 1,000 incoming parents, 87% of which had major gift level capacity.
Blackbaud was the industry leader in higher education CRMs at the time.

Do you think Blackbaud CRM delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Blackbaud CRM's feature set?

No

Did Blackbaud CRM live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Blackbaud CRM go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Blackbaud CRM again?

No

Blackbaud is a fairly straightforward CRM, easy to train and navigate, which allows new users to jump in quickly and begin searching or pulling information from it. It's critical that standards and uniformity are set by an organization from the beginning, though. This is what makes the retrieved information useful. Additionally, making global changes is a clunky, difficult process in Blackbaud, so it's better to define all terms and parameters from the start than try to adjust it later.

Using Blackbaud CRM

250 - Prospect research, prospect management, fundraising, gift administration, constituent records management.