Raiser's Edge NXT is cloud fundraising and constituent relationship management software from Blackbaud.
N/A
Sparkrock
Score 9.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Sparkrock’s cloud-enabled solution helps organizations manage their finance and accounting, human resources and payroll, human services case management, and donor and fundraising activities. According to the vendor, key benefits and features include: Finance Management with capabilities to help organizations increase transparency and reduce risk. Workforce Management to help front-line employees deliver services to clients, with tools that help them to be…
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.
For all companies that want to improve the performance of their employees and increase productivity, this software helps all daily business tasks to be executed on time efficiently and smoothly. A very useful program that's why we don't stop using it.
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.
Many of the improvements are being met with each upgrade. Altus Dynamics has an idea portal that customers can add ideas to and vote on other customer ideas. This means that most issues that come up are resolved with each new upgrade.
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.
Complete workflow management to keep up to date and orderly the daily activities of employees. Allows for seamless cash flow, invoicing, general ledger, payroll, and inventory.
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.
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.
As a technician it's hard for me to say what effect the ROI has had on our organization, however our finance team seems satisfied on it. We look forward to deploying the staff dashboards for better financial tracking throughout our whole organization.
