Likelihood to Recommend I think Causeview is well suited for those who are looking to track revenue and donor information in the same place. It is good to have your database with all of your contacts integrated with the same system that you use to process things such as donations and event registrations, so it saves time and we don't have to maintain separate systems for our development work and our other revenue-generating strategies. We also use reports to pull up information about donors and use that information for fundraising -- for example, donor history and things like that.
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 Causeview's support team is mostly helpful and quick to respond. Causeview integrates event registrations within Salesforce. 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 Event registration and donation pages could be better designed - not up to par with sites such as Eventbrite I would like to have the option for people to register with more than one e-mail address instead of creating a duplicate record each time someone uses a different e-mail. Some of my coworkers find Causeview confusing to use or difficult to find information. 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 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 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 Causeview's support is a lone bright spot. They are often quick to respond. They are generally helpful, although brief in their answers and explanations. I would appreciate more detailed answers to technical problems, but I do appreciate their support's problem solving ability
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 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 I did not personally select Causeview for my organization, but I have found it easy to use in comparison with other similar systems. The fact that Causeview can be added to
Salesforce , and hop on our existing database, is very important to us and is one of the main reasons we continue to use the service.
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 Negative: expensive per-license fee with no discount for added users. Negative: unreliable servers that host donate pages. 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