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
It’s been 2 years since IRIS CRM is supporting me by supporting my business and I have seen enormous progress in my business so far which is a really good sign and is enough for me to be satisfied with it. According to me and as I have observed it is fully loaded with many useful tools that can help in uplifting a business. Removes the manual cycle from me entering every people's hours exclusively. We really evaluated Bullhorn cover and tab it was not awful by any means.
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
Grouping is done very effectively. For a company with a wide product portfolio, it is greatly beneficial to customize product families.
Streamlines the life cycle of merchant services very well. E-signatures, workflows, and help tickets are well integrated to maximize efficiency.
Processing stats and reporting tools are intuitive, useful, and aesthetically pleasing. The software allows you to quickly generate sales reports for specific product families and time periods.
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
It is a wonderful software with an automated messaging service. It has helped us in having a better knowledge of our customer’s needs, preferences, and habits, and by knowing all these we have improved our business. Security is my basic concern and the fact that it has a disabled human element from the business equation are the things that I don’t really like in it.
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.
It has enabled us to keep a record of the demographics of our clients and eventually we can develop a better understanding of our clients that will lead us to uplift our business. With its amazing sales tool, we have developed a strong relationship with our clients, and helped us in creating a good brand image. We really adore the convenience of managing and reporting data. It is quite easy to handle and all our business is depended on it and it helped us in gaining more loyal customers.
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.
By using IRIS CRM we had a wonderful experience with the automated workflow process as compare to other alternatives. Now we are better able to keep a track of the performance and hence we can enhance productivity and eventually can get more profit.it has made automated messaging so convenient and simple. We believe that by understanding our customers we can make our business better and IRIS helped us in having a better knowledge of our customer’s needs, preferences, and habits, and by knowing all these we have improved our business a lot. We have found it very convenient to navigate and now we can better spread our business database. It helped us in having active and strong customer service and now we can better manage our relationship with our customers.
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.
The cost is a bit higher than other options (~$1300/mo), which can be seen as a negative in an absolute sense.
The improvement in workflow management has been significant, and has saved at least 50 man-hours per week across our organization.
Accurate rolling sales data reporting has been critical in defining quality metrics. This benefit is more indirect, but it has allowed us to better respond to changes in customer complaint trending.
