Blackbaud CRM would be a great tool for larger organizations or higher education institutions with a high quantity of constituents. It is great for organizing a lot of information in a single record. While it would be great for any organization, it may be under-utilized for smaller businesses that don't have repeat customers or constant information streams.
If you need a basic Salesforce integrated payment processor then you could consider using iATS. If you have complex needs and need a complex integration with Salesforce you might want to look elsewhere.
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.
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
It is purely dependant on who you reach and speak to. You can call twice in an hour period and get two completely different answers. You can get people who are willing to help, people who just tell you no, or people who have no idea what to do. They need to work harder on training their support people. The chat function works very well for simple questions and is my preferred go-to when seeking help.
There are some situations where i would choose iATS, but there are other excellent competitors that should be considered as well. Which you choose will depend on your particular needs, the size of your organization and what functionality you need
Blackbaud is a big name brand, that has a lot of options for your organization. Since it has different layers, you have the ability to seek support from all of those layers whenever. There are organizations all around the world, so you have the ability to join support groups where you can find other organizations that are dealing with similar issues or things to figure out.
Authorize.Net does not currently integrate with Salesforce which was a critical function that we needed, so we switched to iATS a little over 2 years ago once we implemented our Salesforce database. We are currently in the process of switching to Classy/WePay for the added features and better field mapping capabilities.
If you go with Blackbaud purchase the extended training package. Your staff will thank you.
The mantra is "If it isn't in Blackbaud it doesn't exist" is a contradiction because best practice with Blackbaud is to not use attachments which means we had to archive copies of donor letters or membership in a completely separate system. Really? What is the point? Or pay more and more and more...
