Raiser's Edge NXT is cloud fundraising and constituent relationship management software from Blackbaud.
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Bonterra Development + Digital
Score 6.8 out of 10
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Bonterra Development + Digital enables nonprofits to increase efficiency, optimize supporter and prospect interactions, and raise more money by providing expansive fundraising, digital, and organizing tools on a unified CRM.
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Pricing
Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT
Bonterra Development + Digital
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT
Bonterra Development + Digital
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
Optional
Additional Details
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Contact team@info.bonterratech.com for more information about pricing.
I prefer RE to Salesforce CMS. RE is way less complicated and has a lower barrier for entry. The training is also easier. It works better to manage real donor relationships, integrates with Outlook, pulls lists easier and has a way better email messaging tool.
We have a mix of both direct mail and online donor base and Blackbaud Raiser's Edge/Raiser's Edge NXT provides the right-size product to manage all of the different channels and the processes involved in managing them. The canned reporting is also very helpful when creating …
Blackbaud is very robust but the user-friendly portion is weak. All the other CRMs look newer, easier to navigate, and actually a pleasant experience. Blackbaud is just not easy on the eyes. TOO MANY OPTIONS.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
