Likelihood to Recommend Specifically, the customer service is one of the best of any online service we have used. The staff is respectful and speedy, and I have never had any occasion to be disappointed in their help. The silent auction tool we have used for the past two online silent auctions has been excellent. We are about to use the new service. I've been working on setting it up, and so far, so good. We would really like to track our volunteers in Network for Good somehow. Not to do recruitment or volunteer forms, as we don't use public recruitment of volunteers for our use. However, volunteer hours are very important as we do fundraising and grantwriting, as they show our excellent relationship with the community. I'd like to be able to track the volunteer hours... especially if they are also donors. I sure would appreciate a REAL text-to-give, where it's not 10 numbers to text-to-give but just 6 or so. We have tried using this and the feedback we have gotten is "This isn't so easy." To be able to say: "Text MITTENS to 123456" is a lot cleaner than "Text MITTENS to 888-888-8888." Granted this is a small thing, but this is what people ask about.
Read full review Raisers Edge is outstanding for storing and reporting on constituent data and communications. There are many options for creating methods of tracking by different information included and also for creating personalized tracking methods.
Raisers Edge is not very well suited for an organization that also has a gift shop and visitors center. Allowing membership admission and item sales is not practical.
Read full review Pros Top-notch customer service! The Network For Good team is responsive, genuinely courteous, and knowledgeable about the product. Communication options are available for all donor preferences, from good old-fashioned direct mail to email, text, and video. And all are easy to use! Creating forms for surveys and other data capturing is very easy, as is construction of reports on donors and donations for management use. Love the format options and drag-and-drop functionality -- including embedding videos -- for newsletters and email engagements. Read full review Raiser's Edge is good in allowing detailed categorizations for donations - Funds/Campaigns/Appeals/Packages Raiser's Edge has good query functioning and is helpful in pulling lists and segments of constituents and donations The variety of detail across sections (Gifts/Bios/Actions) is helpful for recording and archiving constituent information Read full review Cons Individual contact listing being required before the company or business causes some business to be dropped if the individual leaves the business when you have a donor who donated both as a business and as an individual sometimes one or the other does not come up in the listing when you search for an amount for the year FaceBook donations being identified by at least who did the fundraiser, not the donors. I do a birthday fundraiser every year for Caring Carroll and there is no indication that it came from me. The money comes in but we do not know where it came from who held the fundraiser. The fact that the FaceBook donations go into our Network for Good database before we even have the money is confusing. Read full review Data posting to Financial Edge (FE) is limited and complicated to understand (took us time to adjust). The posting report does not have enough info: Appeal, campaign and who posted to FE. In genereral, RE/FE integration is not explained by Blackbaud properly, we had to figure out everything on the go. Volunteer module is a bit cumbersome; some fields have duplicate fields in the event module; the identical information ends up being recorded in two different places. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We are still learning and rebuilding our nonprofit using this platform, so this year is a trial run to see how we can increase our network and our donations. So long as we are able to see a significant return on investment in terms of donations received through the platform, we will renew for next year.
Read full review There are many CRM tools on the market however Raisers Edge especially with NXT offers everything you need in one database. It’s a little pricey however Blackbaud support is super helpful and they offer so many tools and add ins.
Read full review Usability It's very easy to use and customizable.
Read full review it does lots of things well (prospect tracking and event management), some things FANTASTIC (gift records and donations and relationships). It is rigid enough for the database administrator to maintain good clean data, but flexible enought for customization across organizations so specific data can be kept as needed for YOUR specific organization needs.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Since the software is expensive to use, only so many people are able to active users at once. There are times when I may have to wait or ask another user to log out so that I may log in.
Read full review Support Rating Bonterra customer service is slow and terrible. They take forever to address the actual issue, constantly making incorrect assumptions about the issue. I have spent more than 45 minutes on hold, just to speak with a customer service representative when the chat function was unable to provide assistance with my issue.
Read full review For most users, only chat support is available. There is a phone number, but it is very labor-intensive to get someone on the phone, and the chat does not include an easy way to screen share. Those sessions need to be scheduled in advance and almost begged for; the chat line always has a long wait time, and sometimes it seems their support personnel is chatting with more than one client at a time.
Read full review Implementation Rating NFG is great and the process was smooth. thank you.
Read full review It's critically important to consider where you are taking your fundraising efforts and strategy, and to collaborate closely with other departments who will also use RE. I would strongly recommend that you investigate best practices -both from Blackbaud (theory) and with other organizations (practice) - to create a user manual and guide for RE within your organization
Read full review Alternatives Considered For us, Bonterra Guided Fundraising offered the best overall bang for the buck. There were cheaper options that didn't over the features we needed and more expensive options that we felt didn't offer features as good as the ones we were seeing at Bonterra. For an overall option that did more of what we wanted to do, Bonterra was the best choice for us.
Read full review Salesforce has a more modern feel and I felt that it was easier to perform functions beyond the basics, such as running reports for analysis, on
Salesforce . But The Raisers Edge already existed at my company and given that I only needed it for basic functions and did not need much training to do those, I decided to use The Raisers Edge.
Elora Tocci Senior Communications Associate for Public Affairs and Development
Read full review Return on Investment We signed up with Network for Good in the fall of 2022 & had a last minute end of year giving campaign using videos we made in Network for Good & emailing them. We also used giving pages & listed a variety of giving amounts that a donor could select. We experienced at least a 20% increase in giving. Increase in our communication with donors because there are tools in Network for Good that make it easy. Our organization looks more professional with the giving pages & it accommodates ways to give. Read full review It takes longer than necessary to do things so that makes it cost more staff time to complete the work we need. One example is with online gifts since you can't import these into a batch we have to manually add all of the online gifts which is time consuming. Read full review ScreenShots Bonterra Guided Fundraising Screenshots