Blackbaud Altru vs. Raklet Community & Membership Management Software

Well suited for smaller organizations that want to centralize many systems. Smaller organizations will have less constituents to manage and fewer events (our organization has 100,000+ constituents, daily programs/events, and a large donor base). Many areas within Altru are not updated to be functional for 2020. Because of this, we do not use the merchandising feature, the volunteer portal, or marketing communications. It does a little bit of everything "okay enough" to be better than having separate systems. It's restrictive in many areas, but being able to do SO much in one database outweighs the negatives! It is 100% necessary to have a data manager who spends all of their time in Altru doing data cleanup, researching and writing policies and procedures, training new users, keeping staff up-to-date on new processes, creating queries and running reports, creating workarounds for "unfixable" issues within the database.

Raklet Membership Management Software is most suitable for membership-based organizations like ourselves. If you want to create different membership plans and restrict some of the content for your paid members, Raklet can definitely be helpful. Also, our members were never this engaged before we decided on the solution. The membership management is off the hook; we can see all the activities of our members, and we don't need to manually correct their information, as they are able to update themselves. But if you want to sell physical goods to your members, you would need to use another marketing base besides Raklet Membership Management Software. We were able to go through, as we restricted some pages only to our paid members.

• Ticketing and tracking many different types of admission sales including group, facility rental, individual tickets, and class registration.
• Membership management, including membership card mailing, recurring memberships, and renewal reminders.
• Being an all-encompassing database rather than forcing you to use multiple databases.
• Great customer service and client support, including ongoing updates to better the system.
• Has a merchandise inventory management system.

• Membership management
• Great customer service
• Value for money is off the chain
• All the necessary features are included

• Query system not user-friendly for management with limited database background.
• Limited company-to-user support outside of an online community of users. No long term account managers for program.
• No email analysis tools for eblasts.
• Limited merchandise capabiity for shop use, though the program does allow third party programs to work with it.

Incentivized

• An online store would be nice
• Separate section for newsletter subscriptions
• More payment getaway options

They are always available and very knowledgable. Many times I am able to come up with a solution before they've finished troubleshooting just by having talked through it with them. I really appreciate the Chat feature to answer simple questions in a timely fashion. The training I received was top notch and very detailed.

Incentivized

We switched from Raisers Edge in 2012 due to the need to have all processes in one database. Group Sales/Rentals had to use a separate database for their sales than the Members and Donors department. We also could not sell tickets for events and programs in one space. Being able to have all of these in one database is why we chose Altru.

We also evaluated those products before moving on with Raklet Membership Management Software. I would say the main problem is that these products are well-pronounced among membership management softwares. For this reason, first, their interfaces looked outdated and boring, and we would like to have a better landing page to promote our readers to visit our website. Secondly, they are not as flexible as we like them to be. Most of the other solutions offered one-for-all; we didn't feel like using them because we wanted something special and customized.

• It has become very tedious to account for registrants in each session of a class or camp, because you have to "sell" them into each session in order to have an accurate class roster.
• It is very easy to process payment and entry fees to our Museum and programs.
• It is easy to retrieve accurate information and records of patrons.

Incentivized

• Increased efficiency
• Affordable CRM solution
• Promote people to subscribe at our pages