Blackbaud eTapestry vs. iMIS

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

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.

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

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.

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

• 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.

Incentivized