Designed for large, complex organizations as well as federated and international nonprofits.
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DonorSearch
Score 8.2 out of 10
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DonorSearch is an online database of donors and prospects providing intelligence on donor wealth and capacity for giving, from the company of the same name in Marriotsville.
It works well enough for fundraising purposes and donor tracking. I think it would be less appropriate for instances or industries where you don't need so many data points on someone. You are able to attach a lot of information to a record so if you don't need that info (simply need contact info for example) you might want a simpler system
I would say DonorSearch is well suited as you set out to build donor profiles. I think there are excellent background information on spouses, addresses, real estate holdings, giving priorities, etc. I also like it for grant research - you can find funders who may be interested in your philanthropic priorities and occasionally what those timelines are. I would not suggest using this for absolute strangers to your organization - too much to work through.
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
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.
We've covered a lot, but mostly because we are happy with the system overall. There are a few kinks, and sometimes it takes a minute to figure out the right wording to pull a report or the best way to code a new category that we want to track. But Blackbaud is always there to help us, and once things are figured out - they are super simple to replicate. It wouldn't be worth it to switch to a new system and lose of all our information and time put in to mastering the system
I have not personally had to reach out to Blackbaud CRM Support, because we have a central office that manages the Blackbaud CRM relationship. However, any time I've reached out to our support team, there is nothing they can't figure out by utilizing the support they receive from Blackbaud CRM. I've not had any issues that have gone unresolved, and they can always get things done in a timely fashion.
Most of our issues were self-inflicted and related to BB's work. We did not "staff up" correctly, our data to be converted was not in great shape and we set some unreasonable goals. With BBs help we were able to clean our data and prep it for conversion and we adjusted the goals to be more achievable with the timeline we were given. We found the BB staff to be responsive and focused, especially when working on-site with us.
Blackbaud CRM is more robust and has better functionality. It is necessary for a bigger fundraising shop. Blackbaud Raiser's Edge and NXT worked well in smaller organizations with fewer users and fewer donors/prospects. RE was more affordable than CRM was for the smaller organization.
D&B Hoovers seems much more oriented towards a business looking to sell to clients - to increase their sales pitch opportunities. We had heard good things but the company does not seem oriented toward nonprofit success. I cannot find anything about the D&B Hoovers pricing available online but our DonorSearch subscription is worth it.
Change is always expensive and painful, but CRM is worth the time and effort. One immediate benefit is improved transparency internally, especially for internal accounting, controls, and compliance departments.
Cloud hosting helps cut cost and demand on organization staff. Improves access and meets compliance on every level.
Ability to make global changes to recording donor phone communication makes it a one-stop resource for a well-run development team.
