Likelihood to Recommend As I mentioned, cost is prohibitive for us. Because it is highly customizable, it is very powerful, but if you are looking for an intuitive, easy to use solution right "out of the box" solution because you have few staff and no IT dept. this may not be the best fit (unless they develop some lower cost / less customizable options?). That being said, we have managed to implement successfully with no IT. I completed the implementation, code the application and online reporting forms (using HTML) and use Blueprint to customize what we need, but it has been a big learning curve and an investment of time to manage the back end of the program. I will say that training new general users is pretty straight forward so their ability to search for information they need and quickly is greatly enhanced. The automatic customized reports and reminders are pretty great, and the overall integrity of our processes and data are greatly improved. Sometimes we wonder if it is overly complex and if there is a way e could "hide" more of the aspects that are not relevant to us, or that we are not using, so we can have a cleaner interface.
Read full review It is a great solution for a company that is looking to have a one-stop shop for employee volunteering and giving. It integrates with VolunteerMatch and Workday which is very helpful as the former feeds community volunteer opportunities to our company portal, and the latter is how payroll deductions get processed
Read full review Pros We like to create our own numbering system and Blackbaud Grantmaking allows us that flexibility. When we were having issues with items being in numerical order the tech support was amazing. Creating your own forms is very important for us. We have several different donors and we have a grant application form and a report form for each one. They are easy to create as well as update and access. Alternative ways to hunt for information. I can access a grant by the organization name, project name, grant number or even the name of the person who submitted the grant application. This is critical in a case where the program officer has a nickname for the grant (you can include that as well in the profile) and can't remember anything else. Read full review Dollars for Doers Volunteer Grant program features are very easy to use and manage. Cause cards are a great incentive available through CSR connect. Searching for charities to contribute dollars to is easy to navigate. The Engagement Elements are very user-friendly and easy to update on the admin side. Our employees love them and how easy they are to find and click through. Read full review Cons Application linking process is time consuming System enhancement ideas must be submitted to a community portal and other users must take the initiative to vote on their favorite ideas instead of vendor programmers collecting received ideas and doing the work themselves. Lack of conditional logic in online application Communication with other Blackbaud products notably Employee Volunteering and Engagement (fka AngelPoints) Read full review Date/calendar feature is rough - it automatically puts in a year out so you have to correct that and the time zone needs to automatically populate as it's a huge list that confuses most people. The search feature overall - not intuitive and clunky and usually inaccurate - needs to be fine tuned as well as broadened to include everything associated with a particular event or user - having said that they have made great improvements in this in the recent future so that's something to be grateful for. Read full review Likelihood to Renew As long as there is continued development in the product allowing us to create efficiencies, streamline operations, deliver on our reporting requirements and the usability for internal and external partners remains strong we would have no reason to look elsewhere from a systems perspective. If costs changed substantially we'd have to look at different options to meet our cost savings objectives.
Read full review We have thoroughly enjoyed our relationship with CSRconnect and YourCause/Blackbaud thus far.
Read full review Usability There is room for improvement and the development of the software seem slow. As customers, we hear a lot about what's in development and promises of new features rolling out. However, it feels like those developments take a really long time to show up in they system for my day-to-day use.
Read full review The usability of CSRconnect is light years ahead of our last program and we are so thankful for this. Some of our employees get intimidated by using the computer so it is helpful when the site is user-friendly and welcoming for our employees. They are also easily able to find events in the portal.
Read full review Reliability and Availability It is available when needed. It can be very slow at times.
Read full review Performance We do have issues with having to reload pages when we are working on reports or engagement tiles. If we dont reload something the information that we have been working to input in to the site or the reports do not save. This can be frustrating when we are on time constraints
Read full review Support Rating When it was microwaves they were a lot more Hands-On assistance, but since merging they have better tracking of the issues.
Read full review The implementation process was a bit rocky but ended up okay. The account manager is new and still learning himself so many of our questions are answered with "let me look into that and get back to you". He absolutely gets back to us and is very nice but not always very knowledgeable which can get frustrating.
Read full review Online Training It was a little challenging doing training on line i think in person may have been a little easier. we also did training before we had access to certain things so when the time came to use that training we had questions that came up that were not apart of the initial training.
Read full review Implementation Rating Preparing and cleaning up your data prior to implementation, will make the process much smoother and easier. Garbage in, garbage out.
Read full review The implementation of CSRconnect takes way, way too long. Having to take down your entire CSR site for weeks, if not months, is an issue. Issues still arise from the implementation in terms of ensuring that reports and statistics on active users are pulling properly, as well as the transfer of information from one system to another. Some of this is definitely to be expected, as transferring this much information is a challenge. However, I would hope that issues would have been resolved by now
Read full review Alternatives Considered At the time that I used GrantedGE, the product was in the development stages and there were a lot of bugs and issues with functionality. The customer service didn't have the bandwidth to quickly respond to issues. BlackBaud's customer service and history in the field are advantages
Read full review Scalability It has worked for our large company fine.
Read full review Return on Investment It has increased our return on reaching our business objectives. It has moved us (or started to move us) to a better place in reporting and transparency. It has helped us transition from an act of corporate giving to a goal of social change. Read full review We have been able to more accurately track global volunteerism. Having an online platform for employees to organize their team volunteer projects has been wonderful. They are either doing more of them (we are so busy) or they were always doing all these activities but we are just finally aware of them because there is a platform to use now. Reporting is not as flexible nor robust as we need it. Still doing many manual steps to get the data how we need it. Read full review ScreenShots Blackbaud Grantmaking Screenshots YourCause CSRconnect Screenshots