Raiser's Edge NXT is cloud fundraising and constituent relationship management software from Blackbaud.
N/A
Neon Fundraise
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound, acquired by Neon One in 2018) offers an online social fundraising platform supporting event registration and campaign management with automation.
$1,900
per year
Pricing
Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT
Neon Fundraise
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Campaign
$1,900
per year
Premier
$4,000
per year
Elite
Custom Quote
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT
Neon Fundraise
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Pricing for all three packages includes implementation. Transactions with Neon Pay are 2.75%, and processing fees are 2.99% + $0.30. Opting for a third party processor incurs a 1% increase in transaction fees across all packages.
Campaign Package: Best for small organizations that want to provide a great peer-to-peer experience for one campaign at a time.
Premier Package: The right choice for organizations that need to run multiple campaigns simultaneously to engage even more supporters.
Elite Package: For organizations that process more than $500,000 a year or have special needs for features like a bi-directional Salesforce sync.
RE and Luminate never worked for us. There were too many bugs and features that didn't exist. Luminate was hard to navigate for our fundraisers and didn't sync with RE as it should have.
Rallybound does all the things that Blackbaud couldn't, including being user friendly.
Personally, I feel that Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT is a good solution for any size organization. They have all you need to maintain and use data regardless of how many records. It’s easy to learn and use. Plus, they offer a ton of resources that you can use to constantly keep learning how to best use features.
Neon Fundraise (formerly Rallybound) is well suited to third-party fundraising. We use it for our walk fundraiser, and we enjoy the level of interactivity and customization it offers our constituents. It also makes donation entry and reporting fairly easy, so it would be well suited for operations with vast numbers of donations in cash, check, and credit. It might be less suited to events with a handful of large donations from corporate benefactors.
Rallybound is able to have websites that are user-friendly to our participants. Our participants are able to navigate through their profiles with ease. With our participants able to easily navigate their pages, the staff is able to spend less time asking questions and instead coach their fundraising efforts.
Rallybound is able to customize your website to your needs, for a fee of course. Rallybound is also able to customize certain reports for you if that specific report has not already been created. This is essential for my team when pulling revenue numbers or projecting future revenue/budgets.
Rallybound's customer service is quick to respond and helps navigate issues. This is crucial when you are on-site at an event trying to solve a problem.
Rallybound allows you to check-in individuals based off of the registration on their website. Their check-in is so simple and easy to use.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Overall I feel like I receive sufficient assistance when reaching out to Blackbaud's Support area. When my questions cannot be answered completely during an online chat I appreciate the ability to easily access the ongoing notes so everything is together. It can be frustrating at times, though, as emailing back and forth seems to make solutions take longer.
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.
As with most trainings, the learning curve is more difficult when mostly online, and I felt that we could have used more check-ins once we'd been using the product for a few months. Most things were explained well enough, but the difficulties discovered through use were not always addressed right away.
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 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.
I was not a part of the evaluation process when Rallybound was selected. Classy was one of our top three choices, however, when we decided to eventually go with Rallybound. I do know that my team continues to look for the best platform to use, and Classy is always discussed.
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.
