Blackbaud eTapestry is a donor management solution that helps growing nonprofits build a stable foundation for success, beat fundraising goals, and catalyze growth. eTapestry boasts more than 6,000 nonprofits and institutions as users, who manage and track fundraising performance, engage new supporters, and maximize existing donor relationships with the software.
$115
per month Usage based per constituent record
Bonterra EveryAction
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Bonterra EveryAction enables nonprofits to increase efficiency, optimize supporter and prospect interactions, and raise more money by providing expansive fundraising, digital, and organizing tools on a unified CRM.
As we are a small Foundation with only one Administrative Assistant, eTapestry is perfect for me to keep all of our CRM. Once I got used to how it worked, I found it to be user friendly. If I have any problems, I can either try to find the answer for myself in the extensive library, chat to support or email our Customer Service Representative with questions. I cannot fault either the Support team or Customer Service Representatives I have dealt with over the years as all of them have been knowledgeable and extremely helpful. I would prefer to have better options within the Email section as the templates are very basic. There is another option to use an eTapestry partner, but there are additional costs involved in that. The email templates are OK to use if you wish to send quick information to your database.
Bonterra EveryAction is a good CRM to use if your company has institutional fundraisers, grants, and individual fundraising, as it is suited to manage the processes that go along with all of those. I've heard that SalesForce has more functionality than Bonterra EveryAction, but I think that Bonterra EveryAction has plenty to learn and is extremely useful.
One stop shop for creating newsletters, sending them out to mailing lists, and tracking analytics (including donations).
Grants management (we are able to track funds received, reports due, and all points of contact associated with a given donor organization).
Contact records (the new contact record feature makes it easy to find past donation history, demographic information, survey responses, communication preferences, etc. for a given contact. We are also able to import information from our donor prospect software into the contact record so everything is in one place).
When I started using eTapestry, you had to pay for courses to learn how to do more complicated things in the database. These courses were fairly expensive and our small organization couldn't afford that. I had to figure a lot out on my own or using the tech folks in chat or the odd free thing. Not sure if the courses are still costly or not.
It is not particularly user friendly--for example, you would think the drag and drop email template would be pretty straightforward but it is not! And there aren't built in instructions to help as you try to use things.
Figuring out how to organize queries and reports and communications in folders in order to find things again has been challenging. It is possible to search on keywords, which is very helpful. But finding something in a list of queries that is not alphabetical isn't particularly easy.
We do not always get positive solutions from Etapestry. There are a lot of resources and solutions that you can read about and reach out to. I participate in Community Forums and trainings to see what we can be doing differently.
We will never us EA, nor recommend them to another org, simply based on their failed promises to deliver training, on-boarding and then charging our account during our free 3 month period, then after cancelling the contract their legal department tried to force us to sign a cancellation agreement that barred us from writing reviews, making comments, etc!
eTapestry was the first donor database I had ever used and always found it to be much easier to use and administer than the databases I was used to (patient care and payroll databases). The rare times I can't figure out how to do something, I just hope on the chat and someone from the team pleasantly walks me through the process. If it's something that database is incapable of doing, they encourage me to log my suggestion in the idea bank so it can be considered for enhancements. On top of that, the regular training provided allows you to continue building your skills within the database
It's just so easy--there isn't a lot of techy lingo or graphics, so a regular person can log in and have a sense of what does what. There might be a few terms you need to learn, but everything is in common English so you can almost always find what you're looking for.
I have never had an issue accessing eTapestry. It does occasionally go down for maintenance. When that happens, they give you a lot of notice and generally schedule maintenance for hours between midnight and 6am so that business won't be disrupted.
The only issue I have had with availability is when I don't have my work phone with me, which prevents me from providing a multi-factor authentication code to access the portal. Other than that, I have not had an issue with availability or outages.
The product does what it is supposed to, although there are downsides. There are positive and negatives for every product. This is less expensive alternative for a small organization tracking minimum information.
My favorite feature is the Live Chat. If we get stuck, we can get immediate help, download the chat and save it for later so if we need help again we have it on file. The Knowledge Database is also extremely helpful.
I feel like product support and training should go hand in hand. Having to pay $5k to learn how to use a database is absolutely ridiculous and should be offered with the cost of your database, as it is with every other database I've ever used in the last 10 years of my career. With that being said, once I took the training, I found that the support was much more available. Having training and support behind a paywall is bad business in my opinion
They explained everything well to us throughout the process. It was easy to find resources needed to answer any questions that we had. Support was also available should we need further assistance from the resources found online. They were also quick to respond to our teams inquiries, which was much appreciated.
They went through all the features and explained in easy-to-digest details what features the system had. They were also responsive to questions we had. We were able to check in with the support team after training and received prompt followups that helped supplement the training after we had real-world experience using the system.
I was not there for the implementation of this platform. Unfortunately I am unable to just skip this question as it requires a response, which needs to be fifty characters, so here we are. At thirty four, I need to add a few more words to satisfy this requirement. Done.
It natively integrated with NGP Van extremely well. it also integrated very well with our zoom platform and our use of the Mobilize platform. The bulk upload feature allowed us to move large amounts of initial data into the platform easily. The removal of duplicates was also a fairly easy task.
We have researched 2-3 other donor platforms and we just aren't at a place to change, although we are very tempted. eTapestry is getting us by for now and we don't look forward to the day when we have to change platforms and have to change things for our monthly donors. We worry about attrition if our donors have to change platforms.
Nation Builder—I would say this is a very pared-down version of VAN that requires extensions and outside software to do about 80% of what VAN can do natively. NB does have a better geocoding system that can geocode a location with just the address and does not require coordinates.
Communicating with your audiences at a regular pace is a good thing, and Bonterra Development + Digital makes that easy enough to do. We see lower-than-normal open rates for our industry (per one study I read), but our overall reach is better than had we nothing. It's hard to give the credit for that to Bonterra Development + Digital.
