Designed for large, complex organizations as well as federated and international nonprofits.
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iMIS
Score 4.2 out of 10
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iMIS EMS is an Engagement Management System (EMS) – fusing database management and web publishing into a single system – to drive operational efficiencies, revenue growth, and continuous performance improvement. Harnessing the power of Microsoft Azure’s cloud platform, iMIS EMS is purpose-built to meet the most important challenge facing associations and non-profits – Engagement.
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
iMIS Engagement Management System is well suited for associations or other non-profits that operate without a lot of bells and whistles. So far in my experience if you want to do more sophisticated operations, marketing in my specific role, then iMIS Engagement Management System may not be the best AMS. It does the basics well but the more high-powered you want to get then the more it's going to cost by having your vendor of choice to work to enhance or upgrade what you have.
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
One-stop-shop. I love that we have one system that will track our income, manage membership, email contacts, manage our website and pull reports.
Response time on support tickets. Whenever I have a problem using iMIS, I can either log into their support site to submit a help ticket or send it directly from my email account. Someone normally responds to me within the hour and then I will get a solution within the day no matter the time of day I submit the ticket.
Easy to use widgets. I love using widgets to pull a page together. They have slideshow widgets that use on a daily basis. There are also forum widgets and widgets to pull an already created query to a page you choose to display this information on.
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.
System Performance: iMIS has always seemed to have had performance issues....sluggish specifically. Though some of that may be in part to some of our customizations, but we don’t think so.
Integrations with 3rd Party Products: we would like to see more integrations with 3rd party apps.
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 an excellent database! There isn't a database on the market which is perfect for everyone but this one is very very close and does most of what we need.
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.
I think both are great tools. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. I really like the CMS component that comes with iMIS. It is important for an organization to be able to quickly build websites to engage their members. iMIS provides tools to do this out of the box.
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.
iMIS had a neutral impact on my non-profit organization's overall business objectives. Both the finance and department teams just worked around the limitations that iMIS had.
