Blackbaud eTapestry vs. Fundraising Report Card

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.

Incentivized

If you work in a Development/Fundraising Department and have EVER been asked what your donor retention rate is - this is for you.

Incentivized

• Report Scheduling is great. Reports can be scheduled daily (even on specific days of the week), weekly, or monthly) and auto-emailed.
• Reports can be displayed on the screen, downloaded, or emailed in CSV, excel, or pdf and can have columns pre-sorted in your preferred order.
• Online donations are automatically added to the donor's account and automatically create an account for a new donor.

Incentivized

• It makes preparing fundraising reports super easy. I used to spend 6-8 hours preparing a board report and now it takes me 30 minutes... PLUS I can pull up the reports in real time during board meetings to allow board members to see the data presented in different ways or to answer questions on-the-spot.
• It has metrics that I've never even thought to prepare - including some that always felt too complicated to prepare. Lifetime Donor Value, Donor Retention Rates, Lapsed Donors, Acquired Donors, Reactivated Donors - all broken down by giving segments.
• I can customize Giving Segments. I work at a small non-profit - a major gift for us is different than a major gift for a larger organization. I can break up my data in the segments that make sense for my organization [and select colors that match our branding... you've never seen a happier Marketing Chair on your Board of Directors than when you give them a report that is properly branded for the organization. It's a small thing, but it doesn't take any extra work on my part.]

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The only difficulty I have with Fundraising Report Card is that the integration with our CRM [Kindful] doesn't keep track of the unique ID that is exported to Fundraising Report Card [to maintain confidentiality]. So it takes a bit more work to identify which donor[s] fall into a category. For example, Fundraising Report Card will tell me that 3 major donors lapsed in the previous quarter - and I can export the Donor ID's from Fundraising Report Card, but those ID's don't mean anything in my CRM, so I can't directly see who those donors are to follow up. This is an issue with the integration specifically with Kindful.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

In person training is always helpful for a new product however I think that the online tutorials would do just fine.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

No, I would not change anything

Incentivized

The product overall is not too bad but I would not suggest for a large nonprofit organization.

Incentivized

We didn’t use professional services

Incentivized

• Increased our capacity to fundraise.
• Allowed more opportunity to know our donors (tracking and data collection).
• Limited users - due to steep learning curve - as such less of our development staff know how to use the system to its fullest potential.

Incentivized

• While I don't think I can entirely quantify the ROI for Fundraising Report Card, it made it possible for us to make better decisions and set better goals. Before we had this tool, we either spent way to much time analyzing data in spreadsheets [trying desperately not to make mistakes] OR more often, made strategic decisions without the facts to back us up. Our fundraising efforts are much smarter than before, and we KNOW where are areas of concern lie.
• We don't have to guess whether or not our strategies are working. We know.

Incentivized