Likelihood to Recommend I think this product is well-suited for educational institutions, both at the private high school level and the higher education level. It covers a lot of ground in terms of recording information, and you have a lot of ability to tailor the software to your needs. I think there's some room for growth in terms of recording DEI information. Organizations who have very small staff may not want to consider this product because they might not have the time to take advantage of all the capabilities NXT has.
Read full review I have used the Bonterra Development + Digital tool at 4 different organizations since 2016. I think Bonterra Development + Digital is an excellent tool for smaller non-profit organizations as well as those organizations that have not used a CRM in the past. Its functionality, ease of use, and excellent customer support make it an excellent tool for small non-profit organizations. Once an organization has more than 5,000 donors/prospects the tool becomes less effective primarily because of the inability to track contacts, integrate with desktop email systems such as Outlook.
Read full review Pros Tracks history of gifts and makes it easy to see giving over time, also good at organizing and accessing complete constituent information around contact information, displaying gifts with date and designations, restrictions etc.. NXT provides easy access to analytics and reports to share for specific dates etc. to support decision making and planning Display format and organization of analytical information is very intuitive and easy to navigate and helpful in developing reports for presentations. Read full review Some people find the Create A List tool more intuitive than other record-querying equivalents, which can make it easier for digital organizers to target and segment bulk emails, broadcast texts, door-knocking sheets, etc. The ability to add custom fields on both Contact and Contribution records allows for some flexibility in making the system adapt to your organizing model There aren't a lot of other tools out there that make phone banking quite as accessible EveryAction's Email Series/Automations allow for some pretty sophisticated things to run mostly on their own, from welcome and reactivation series, to drip campaigns For the most technical EveryAction users, the ability to customize online form appearance and functionality using callback functions allows for pretty intricate customization of submitter experiences (e.g. redirecting form submitters to different destinations based on how they filled out the form) Read full review Cons Reporting tools are not flexible enough to cover our needs The import/update tools do not cover all data points (e.g. fund relationships) If there isn't a way to do something in RE, you're forced to come up with your own solution - support does not help in this regard Read full review Event Summaries & Contributions - I wish we could add more than one contribution to an event at a time; this ends up taking hours to apply for donations. Volunteer Activity and Scheduling - there is currently not a robust Volunteer section to schedule and track. Faith Tracking - a space for churches, pastors, etc. would be great so we don't have to use Custom Contact Fields. Planned Giving - needs a tab in the 'View All Details" view, currently only in 'View Contact Record" mode. Primary Contact - needs multiple options with labels. We have many contacts at the same place and Relationships don't always have the right option. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have a lot invested in NXT and it suits our needs perfectly. There would be no reason for us to consider a needless conversion to a new solution. I do not believe there is any other product on the market that would be worth considering.
Read full review We will never us EA, nor recommend them to another org, simply based on their failed promises to deliver training, on-boarding and then charging our account during our free 3 month period, then after cancelling the contract their legal department tried to force us to sign a cancellation agreement that barred us from writing reviews, making comments, etc!
Read full review Usability NXT seems easy to learn on a relatively deep level. There are glitches, like with everything, but it is usually easy to see where they are, most of time. I like that Development staff can choose what they want to see and where they want to see it, and it doesn’t affect my screen.
Read full review It's just so easy--there isn't a lot of techy lingo or graphics, so a regular person can log in and have a sense of what does what. There might be a few terms you need to learn, but everything is in common English so you can almost always find what you're looking for.
Read full review Reliability and Availability The only reason I cannot give a 10 is because like all web based products, internet connection is required and that is not something that can be counted on 100% of the time. When the internet connection is stable, I have had little to no issues using Raiser's Edge.
Read full review On the whole, EveryAction has been very responsive. When we have had errors, they usually respond within a few days, and there have not been outages that I can recall. When they need to take the system down for maintenance, they always give plenty of notice
Read full review Performance NXT itself is a pretty simple interface, and is great for front-line fundraisers to be able to look up info and run some simple "reports"/analysis. It's very quick and intuitive, but the back-end attached to it (RE 7.96) may have connectivity issues from time to time. NXT itself, though, is simple enough that issues are rare.
Read full review Will not go higher than 8 because of how often I end up locked out
Read full review Support Rating The support hat Blackbaud can be iffy at times. When they are busy they must hire on a large temporary worker pool to help support and often times they are not capable of answering the right questions and delaying the process for your solution to be complete. When it is not the busy time, most things get answered in a normal rate.
Read full review I feel like product support and training should go hand in hand. Having to pay $5k to learn how to use a database is absolutely ridiculous and should be offered with the cost of your database, as it is with every other database I've ever used in the last 10 years of my career. With that being said, once I took the training, I found that the support was much more available. Having training and support behind a paywall is bad business in my opinion
Read full review In-Person Training When you get a good, knowledgeable person for in-person training, you can't beat it! Hands on, real time, questions answered on the spot. And they want to make sure you get what you needed before leaving. To also have dedicated time without other distractions is very important to the learning process in my opinion.
Read full review Online Training For the most part, the instructors who teach the online courses are very knowledgeable and personable. I will say that the instructor-led classes, which are the only actually helpful form of online training offered by Blackbaud, are likely prohibitively expensive for many, especially if you have multiple team members who need to be trained. One-off classes do not necessarily provide the best return on investment as you may not have selected the best class for the training that you're looking for, or you may sign up for a class that is taught by a poor instructor (which is rare) and you'll find yourself needing or wanting to take it again. The only other option is to sign a multi-year contract which is, again, expensive, and may be more than you need. There are definite gaps in some of the course offerings as Blackbaud
Raiser's Edge NXT is relatively new. Most of the classes also require a time commitment of one and a half to three hours, which could be more than your staff can spare.
Read full review They went through all the features and explained in easy-to-digest details what features the system had. They were also responsive to questions we had. We were able to check in with the support team after training and received prompt followups that helped supplement the training after we had real-world experience using the system.
Read full review Implementation Rating Blackbaud was with us every step of the way during the migration of our data to the newer version of the software. They made it as easy as possible, and the huge task that it was was made much easier with their help.
Read full review I expected more. We made the decision not to transfer data from my old system into EveryAction, starting fresh and new. But when we have sought assistance, it is rarely given. We are most often directed to the training videos. That component I will add, is very frustrating and upsetting.
Read full review Alternatives Considered There just is no system as robust and capable as Raiser's Edge NXT. It's ability to track anything you'd like, give you space to create custom fields (attributes) and utilize fields in different ways than intended give it the extra advatage that we hadn't seen in other products. It's got a vast network of plug ins that help automation features as well.
Read full review EveryAction is just more accessible and intuitive to navigate. It is straightforward, easily embedded on our site, and easy for our new team members to familiarize themselves with the platform. Especially for the advocacy and form-building features, EveryAction has been the best tool our team has used thus far. We enjoy using EveryAction and will likely continue to do so.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model Pricing really seems to be all over the place, and everything else you need is an extra add-on cost. The biggest issue is training. Options are limited unless you subscribe and pay for it across your contract.
Read full review Scalability New features are constantly being added to Raiser's Edge NXT that expand its capabilities. Features such as constituent mapping and easily accessible actions allow for more in-depth analysis of existing constituents. The future ability to manipulate soft-credits and customize reporting dashboards will make NXT even more attractive to our fundraisers and executives. It's great to see that the software is evolving.
Read full review It just works whenever we need it. We'd grown our list and scaled up substantially since buying the product and have had no issues.
Read full review Return on Investment Time management, saved time with data, resulting in a cost savings of 20% Made reporting easy with processing donor gifts and recording them approximately Improved fundraising as the preferred platform and increased donations by 15% Attained a holistic approach to identifying prospective donors Read full review It has saved me time because I can create events and connect Zoom directly and immediately save new contacts to my database from the registration. In targeted emails, we have been able to collect small dollars through low effort fundraising asks. Negative impact is many of our staff is not able to use it yet due to difficulty of navigation so they are going through user guides and tutorials and training to figure it out. Read full review ScreenShots Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT Screenshots Bonterra Development + Digital Screenshots