Blackbaud Online Express vs. Little Green Light

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

When I came on board, we had a mess. We had so many gift types, categories, and campaigns that it was an epic disaster, and there was no way any reports could easily be pulled. With time, patience, and the bulk edit feature, I could clean up the mess and start again with set campaigns, funds, and appeals...We now have a clean slate for all data entered in 2023 and the future. Thank you for bulk edits

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

• Donor touch tracking (calls, meetings, etc.)
• Relationships and stewardship
• Forms for event and other registrations
• Financial reporting and gift tracking
• Great support team! I was initially worried because they don't have a contact number, but they reply to support questions really quickly and are always helpful.

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

• I wish it had email formatting rather than integrating with MailChimp, but a small price to pay since it does in fact handle email communications. I've actually found that donors appreciate the "personal" touch versus the more polished, formatted email of MailChimp because they feel like the email went just to them.
• Wish it had the ability to email year-end statements as easy as it is to print them.

Incentivized

We have had no issues with LIttle Green Light so I do not see us moving to another software platform at this time. We are all familiar with how to use it and we are a small and mighty team so we don't want to rock the boat too much. LOL

Incentivized

Pretty easy to manage

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

LGL support is absolutely unreal. Send a question straight from inside the software and within minutes you will receive a response from someone at the company who will help you. Most of the time, the person responding to my questions is one of the developers or owners of the company. They are kind, patient, and very helpful. The online knowledge base is very comprehensive as well.

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

Little Green Light blows these other two CRM's out of the water. {Little Green Light has] ease of use, user-friendly prompts, and more pertinent information is captured. Little Green Light is perfect for my small-sized Non-Profit organization.

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

• In two years of using it, we went from $200,000 annually in donor revenue to $500,000. Many factors went into that, but the ease of communications through LGL is definitely one of them.
• We went from managing communications with ~200 donors to ~400.

Incentivized