Altru’s pricing information is catalogued below, as supplied by the software provider or retrieved from publicly accessible pricing materials.
Altru is priced as an annual subscription. This includes hosting, unlimited users, access to unparalleled product support – everything you expect from a complete cloud solution.
Having used multiple databases to collect data from visitors across all of our points of contact, we found we had information, but no comparison between areas. It was possible to have a volunteer who made a donation, bought a membership, made purchases in the shop, and attended …
Raiser's Edge is probably the highest functioning database that I've used and it has many positive qualities. I think overall it is a very useful and accurate product, though it could use several updates that other, newer CMS and databases have already instituted.
Raisers Edge was the system used when I started at the organization. We recently explored other software solutions to allow the entire institution (gift shop, cafe, guest services, hospitality, education) to use the same database, but none of the alternatives had the same kind …
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.
Raisers Edge is outstanding for storing and reporting on constituent data and communications. There are many options for creating methods of tracking by different information included and also for creating personalized tracking methods.
Raisers Edge is not very well suited for an organization that also has a gift shop and visitors center. Allowing membership admission and item sales is not practical.
Data posting to Financial Edge (FE) is limited and complicated to understand (took us time to adjust). The posting report does not have enough info: Appeal, campaign and who posted to FE. In genereral, RE/FE integration is not explained by Blackbaud properly, we had to figure out everything on the go.
Volunteer module is a bit cumbersome; some fields have duplicate fields in the event module; the identical information ends up being recorded in two different places.
There are many CRM tools on the market however Raisers Edge especially with NXT offers everything you need in one database. It’s a little pricey however Blackbaud support is super helpful and they offer so many tools and add ins.
it does lots of things well (prospect tracking and event management), some things FANTASTIC (gift records and donations and relationships). It is rigid enough for the database administrator to maintain good clean data, but flexible enought for customization across organizations so specific data can be kept as needed for YOUR specific organization needs.
Since the software is expensive to use, only so many people are able to active users at once. There are times when I may have to wait or ask another user to log out so that I may log in.
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.
For most users, only chat support is available. There is a phone number, but it is very labor-intensive to get someone on the phone, and the chat does not include an easy way to screen share. Those sessions need to be scheduled in advance and almost begged for; the chat line always has a long wait time, and sometimes it seems their support personnel is chatting with more than one client at a time.
It's critically important to consider where you are taking your fundraising efforts and strategy, and to collaborate closely with other departments who will also use RE. I would strongly recommend that you investigate best practices -both from Blackbaud (theory) and with other organizations (practice) - to create a user manual and guide for RE within your organization
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.
Salesforce has a more modern feel and I felt that it was easier to perform functions beyond the basics, such as running reports for analysis, on Salesforce. But The Raisers Edge already existed at my company and given that I only needed it for basic functions and did not need much training to do those, I decided to use The Raisers Edge.
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.
It takes longer than necessary to do things so that makes it cost more staff time to complete the work we need. One example is with online gifts since you can't import these into a batch we have to manually add all of the online gifts which is time consuming.
