Raiser's Edge NXT is cloud fundraising and constituent relationship management software from Blackbaud.
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Sage Intacct
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Sage Intacct is a cloud ERP system targeted at high-growth small and medium-sized businesses. Intacct includes applications for core financials and accounting, purchasing, order management, and financial reporting and business intelligence. It also integrates with 3rd party software like Salesforce.
Sage intact is better than most of the products I have used. I feel that it's always upgrading itself to be a better product, and it always allowing programs to have a streamlined integration. I feel Financial Edge's bank reconciliation would always disconnect and the system …
Our selection choice came down to Netsuite and Intacct. Netsuite - quite frankly - was just too expensive to take the leap for similar functionality. We also determined that the Netsuite setup would require significantly more outside help to configure and migrate data.
Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT is great for a small organization that just needs to track their giving. It will house data and give you some output that can help inform strategy. However, if you really want the system to work for you, you desperately need someone who is tech savvy, detail oriented, and strategy minded. Almost nothing is set up for you at the beginning. You will need to build a lot of the reports, dashboards, and queries yourself. If you've used the system for a while, anything you build will eventually fail because of how often Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT changes things in the system. This system is great for organizations that are small and simple.
Sage has been ideal for our organizations to scale while maintaining functionality. Importing has made growth and acquisitions within our company easy to onboard additional entities from other platforms. The automation features are high quality and necessary for high transaction frequency companies. The reporting is great for overall reviews of business however custom reports can be difficult to create for specific needs. A high amount of training and developer support is needed to get started, however once fully onboarded the workflows and automations do most of the work allowing you to take time to learn the intricacies
Custom, real-time financial reporting. I am able to streamline my reporting to pull in various account groups and calculations which save me time from having to do it in Excel.
Out of the box standard reports for clients who don't require as custom of reporting or even as a great starting point to build out reports.
Integrations with other platforms, such as Airbase, various banks, Rippling, etc.
The dashboard module is extremely helpful in my monthly review of various entities.
There is so much missing functionality in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT (webview) compared to database view - whilst they repeatedly tell us to switch to webview we simply can't due to crucial functionality that is missing.
In our experience, there are a lot of false promises made, particularly when renewing contracts etc, about what functionality is coming soon to webview - particularly regarding the optional modules such as Volunteering.
An increased focus from Blackbaud and all their marketing about pushing third party vendors for certain activities (email marketing being a big one!) all of which come at an additional cost. Although these integrate into Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT, I would prefer Blackbaud to focus on making its own functionality up to standard rather than integrating costly 3rd party platforms.
In my experience, Support for the platform has got worse over the years - I have been waiting over six months to resolve a technical issue which is hampering our use of the functionality.
Inability to create letters within the system (which used to be a feature in RE7 database view) is a huge issue for our supporter base who still appreciate paper-based acknowledgement letters.
I don't know for sure what we'll do, and I wouldn't publicly share that anyways. Speaking only for myself, I wouldn't jump for joy if I was given the task of transferring CRM providers when this org has a Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT database that's 28 years old, but being aware of what's on the market is always responsible. With the planned functionality updates to Web View over 2025-2026, the phasing out of features in database view, and the changes to contract structure laid out in investor updates, there's a lot of factors that could change in the next few years. And Blackbaud has not made it clear how much work the transfer to Web View only will be for us over the next couple years: It means updating all of our policies and procedures and all of our documentation and retraining all of our employees at minimum, and that's assuming that all existing fields and features remain accessible without modification.
Sage Intacct is continuously evolving and increasing it's functionalities. I am excited to attend conferences to learn what is in the roadmap for future releases. Additionally, using Sage Intacct allows me grow as a professional, I am really enjoy the knowledge that I have within the product to be able to share my experiences.
Learning the overall useability of Blackbaud Raiser's Edge is a fairly steep learning curve, however, the support team that Blackbaud Raiser's Edge employs are top notch, helpful and very knowledgeable. Blackbaud Raiser's Edge also maintains an extensive library of articles that are very helpful, as well a useful tutorials, including step-by-step articles as well as instructional videos. With these tools at your disposal you will be competent in no time
The ease of use as a seasoned user is wonderful; however, new users struggle to adapt to the program efficiently. Better training videos--all in one location--would be beneficial. The use of a "sandbox" environment is a great tool for new employees or for the fiscal department to test certain journal entries or other transactions to verify accuracy of data.
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.
There has only been one occurrence where Sage Intacct was not available to me, however I had already been working a number of hours trying to get a project completed. It honestly allowed me to step back and take a much needed break.
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.
As fas as integration is concerned I don't feel this slows Sage Intacct down at all. However, sometimes I do feel it takes some larger reports more time to load due to all the detail. As well as, I "move very fast" in my motions so sometimes I double click on fuctions too quickly and the system seems to think that I have a duplicate request.
You are better off using the user community or Facebook group to get answers than the support provided by Blackbaud. Oftentimes, support reps are not even aware that new features are being rolled out, nor do they have fundraising experience so you end up explaining more to the rep about what you are trying to accomplish and why than getting to the issue.
Only a few times have we had to reach out to support, and every time we did, we received a relatively quick response and a solution was found fairly quickly. Only once was there an issue that took longer than a week to resolve, but it still did eventually get solved.
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.
I have taken in person training classes at several of the annual Sage Intacct user conferences. It is very interactive and the trainers are very easy to follow and understand. They are great at getting everyone in the class involved. They also make sure everyone has learned to task before moving to a new one.
The content is solid, but for those who benefit from in-person interactions, it can be a bit challenging. While the online format is great for flexibility and accessibility, there’s something about face-to-face training that makes it easier to absorb and ask questions in real-time. Overall, though, it’s a solid resource for self-paced learning.
The free training is very minimal. For what we pay for the service, I would like more training. We end up training new users in-house because the provided free training is not nearly comprehensive enough. That being said, the training provided, for the material covered, was adequate and relevant for the given topics.
Training is key. Blackbaud offered the training package prior to implementation and it helped us understand how to build it so that the future use would be appropriate to the operation of the organization. Data conversion stage was also very important. A lot of work must be done before making the final decisions about the data conversion - what data to convert and what to leave out, where certain information was supposed to be placed within RE.
I would not use a thrid party administrator to implement your system, especially if you are going to be modifying the system at all. Use Intacct implementors as they will be able to better support you on any issues that come up after you go live.
I have not used other products like this before. I have used and created some SQL databases and ERPs, but have not used fundraising-specific software such as Raiser's Edge. Based on what I know from other products vaguely similar to this - databases and ERPs - this is very user friendly and easy to pick up for anyone, especially with their NXT webview offering.
Sage Intacct has most of the best features but doesn't have things integrated that I don't need/use. It's very module based so you can add/remove modules as you need to. It's very scalable as well so as I add entities, there's not an incremental software cost like there would be with QuickBooks and it's less expensive than Oracle.
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.
Having everything in one system means that information is much more likely to be up to date. We hardly get any returned mail from the post office when we pull lists.
Our gift officers can easily pull up donor information on their phones while out on a visit, giving them the edge they need to close a gift.
Information tiles on a person's record that are easy to reorganize and collapse per the needs of each user makes finding pertinent information quick.
Positive - It runs better than our old software when we all work together, rather than having to sign off on each other and deal with syncing issues.
Negative - It's not as easy to go back to fix an amount, a date, etc. Sometimes, a very small mistake needs to be corrected by voiding and redoing the entire transaction.
We can successfully sync other software we use with Intacct! It reduces workload when things are automated.
