Ellucian CRM Advance vs. Raiser's Edge

A potential student calls in and we can enter all the information in CRM right then. Ellucian CRM Advance makes it easy for when we go back a week later to see all the notes on the student rather than asking them all over again. Admissions takes the call and enters all info into CRM Advance and then Academics can just log in and see all the notes Admissions took on the student.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Ties fundraising efforts to alumni.
• Seamless integration from Ellucian Colleage or Banner.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Some of the data is not in the most intuitive location.
• The initial learning curve of the system was a bit steep, but after working with the system exclusively, our users got proficient very quickly.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

CRM Advance is very efficient and overall a great product. We have been using CRM for many many years with really no complaints. It fits our needs.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We actually recently dropped CRM Advance and are now live with Raisers Edge. Raisers Edge was much more user friendly and built around the fundraising experience. Integration was possible through a secure FTP interface with Ellucian Colleague. Other Blackbaud products have since been purchased to further enhance fundraising and gift giving.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• We are now able to do a more effective review of applicants and see overall trends of characteristics such as source locations. This helps to focus other efforts such as marketing to support those areas and increase others.
• There is now a full picture of the needs of our students. By being able to view information in a logical progression, trend data can be identified and reacted to.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized