Blackbaud Online Express vs. Give Lively

For 100% tax-deductible donations, I 9.5/10 recommend Blackbaud Online Express. The only thing is that it does not charge debit cards automatically, so I have to do it myself. Using Blackbaud Online Express forms for events gets more complicated. The way events work in Raiser's Edge in general is already complicated, so maybe it's more on Raiser's Edge than it is Blackbaud Online Express.

Incentivized

If you’re not using another service or CRM to manage online forms, then you’ll need something like Give Lively. However, there are so many products with robust feature lineups that can be used to centralize work efforts that a singularly faceted product falls flat.

Incentivized

• Online donation forms are easy to create and place within our existing website. The donations received are easily transferred into our Raiser's Edge database.
• Creating email communications for our constituents is very simple to achieve in Online Express and the statistics provided are very helpful to see what our constituents are clicking on.

Incentivized

• It’s an effective form for donations
• Integrates well with our payment processor stripe

Incentivized

• It does have some "quirks." It can be a little tricky to process the batch until you have done it a few times.
• I had a problem finding a constituent yesterday - he was purchasing a program ad for an event - that I knew was in the database. It turned out that he had been marked inactive, and so apparently wasn't included in the search results.

Incentivized

• The reporting functionality leaves something to be desired. In my opinion, it's hard to find and confusing to understand what timeframe you’re looking at.
• It’d be nice to be able to customize export fields before download. There’s a lot of extra info provided to sift through.

Incentivized

I feel this product is much less user friendly than others I’ve used in its place. I feel I spend too much time searching the overly complicated navigation menus and dealing with export cleanup.

Incentivized

Customer service for all of Blackbaud's products has really lacked over the years. They are starting to get better in the last year but it can very frustrating. The online knowledge base community is the best resource for information. At times it can take hours for a customer sect even rep to help with questions or problems which is not at all ideal in this industry.

Incentivized

Blackbaud Online Express is mainly used strictly because of its integration with Raiser's Edge. If a client uses Salesforce for constituent/lead management, other products can offer more flexibility in designing donation forms, email templates, etc. However, they all have their own negatives in Salesforce integration -- that is a whole other can of worms. While the Raiser's Edge integration of Online Express isn't perfect, it is relatively painless compared to the competition's Salesforce integration. Also, for NFP's, Blackbaud's NFP focused business model is a plus.

Incentivized

I think Little Green Light will be a better alternative. We are currently building the online form so that our donation landing page can link directly with LGL and we’re hoping to cut Give Lively as the middleman platform out of our tech stack.

Incentivized

• Regardless of project or initiative, all fund-raising efforts are managed in one place for the entire organization.
• Donor management is concise, thorough, and systematic - no individual or organization is overlooked.
• Snapshot reporting of successful grant applications and fund-raising are readily available.

Incentivized

• It’s our current donation platform which is a huge benefit to have an online presence that doesn’t involve QR codes and Venmo accounts
• Expands constituents ability to give in other ways beyond cash or check donations

Incentivized