Designed for large, complex organizations as well as federated and international nonprofits.
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Blackbaud CRM
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Blackbaud CRM
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Community Pulse
Blackbaud CRM
Considered Both Products
Blackbaud CRM
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Director
Chose Blackbaud CRM
Blackbaud wins because of the overall organization's specific focus on fundraising. Where Ellucian has been more focused on Banner and other products, showing less interest in alumni/donor engagement and more in student-centered products.
Executive Director of technical Systems and Services
Chose Blackbaud CRM
When were doing our search, in 2016/2017 we identified three products that might have potential for our use. They were Ellucians Advance, BlackBaud e-CRM and Sales Force. We had 18 years experience with Ellucian, we had several Sales Force installations on campus and very …
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 …
Blackbaud is an excellent program that stacks up well with the competition. It provides post-secondary institutions and other not for profits a great way to track donations and donors, reconcile donations, print charitable tax receipts for donors, and provides a strong set of …
I've used Salesforce, which is not good for donor management. I've used e-tapestry which has major limitations as well. However, for a basic user experience, this is a good program.
Blackbaud is the powerhouse and able to handle a large number of donor files. It is not difficult to learn if you take the time to utilize the tutorials. The conversion team was amazing as we worked through the transition.
We previously used Raiser's Edge NXT before switching to Blackbaud CRM. Raiser's Edge was helpful, but it was strictly from a fundraising standpoint. As a higher education institution, we needed the platform to do so much more than just organize fundraising information. We …
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 …
Because we have Blackbaud, using their event module makes database updating and integration much easier that outside products. It is nice to be able to see the full event in one place (guests/seating/donations/tickets/meal choice...) rather than going from database to database …
I was given Blackbaud when I started, and we ultimately switched to Classy because of their support, functionality, and flexibility in making new campaigns and pages.
While Salesforce for Nonprofits is great, Blackbaud CRM is built from the bones up for nonprofits. It doesn't borrow from sales-model CRMs yet incorporates many/most of the great features in a standard CRM.
Blackbaud CRM is a great product, especially when fully optimized, implemented, and supported. Its many features often dwarf some of the smaller CRM offerings on the market. That said it is a complex product requiring a great deal of training in some situations and not all …
I didn't select Blackbaud CRM, it was chosen for us by our National organization. I would not choose Blackbaud if it was my choice. It's outdated and not user friendly.
This system has been in place for awhile and we haven't had the opportunity to look at others yet. It was originally selected for price point and smaller size of our organization.
With Blackbaud you are getting an industry specific solution. Other products can be molded and adapted to fit into a non-profit environment. However, the Blackbaud platform is made for this environment right out of the box. You are paying more than some of these other competing …
I have never used similar products, but I have used Basecamp for a CRM tool. Basecamp is super limiting compared to Blackbaud. They truly do not compare, as the size limitation of Basecamp is a fraction of BB's capacity.
It is more difficult to run reports and extract the information you are looking for. They are a very large company who has no concept of customer service.
In comparing Blackbaud CRM to Raiser's Edge, there is more room to configure, customize and seems more refined. In terms of more refined, I am referring to the user interface, the capturing of data, ability to perform simple or complex marketing processes.
I found the Blackbaud database to simply be more comprehensive and easier to manipulate than the others. The user friendliness of the modules and availability of information in the Blackbaud system was just better.
Blackbaud CRM was much more focused on fundraising and was more customizable. Other products considered were often not 'out of the box' in terms of functionality, however much design was needed prior to implementation.
Honestly I have moved to Salesforce. Salesforce has a stronger user group community, less expensive, more innovation with the appexchange.com and because many corporations use Salesforce, it is pretty easy to get volunteers to support your efforts.
This would really be like comparing apples and oranges. With the exception of Convio, the other platforms are more Enterprise focused where Convio was Non Profit focused. Silverpop & ExactTarget are going to be best in class at what they do just because of the resources they …
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
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.
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.